Joseph FCCLA team attends nationals

JOSEPH — Three chapter members and their adviser traveled to Columbus, Ohio, earlier this month for the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America fall conference, adviser Lisa Collier said.

Rhyson Collier, FCCLA’s Oregon state president; Lauren McBurney, FCCLA Oregon state vice president of development; and Camdyn Weer, Joseph Charter School FCCLA vice president of events, along with Collier made a commitment last year to attend the fall conference. The group achieved that goal Nov. 9-13.

Joseph FCCLA has a strong foothold in local and state FCCLA, but the chapter has been falling short on the national level in a few ways, Collier said.

One missing piece for the chapter has always been lack of attending the fall conference.

“We simply needed to go see what happens there, and figure out how Joseph FCCLA can participate moving forward,” the adviser said. “We are so glad we made this goal a reality, because it was an amazing experience that we will definitely be adding to our yearly schedule.”

Some of the highlights for the students were leadership networking, watching the Knowledge Bowl and listening to speaker Sarah Wells, an Olympic silver medalist in the 400m hurdles.

“We are already communicating with Sarah Wells to figure out how to bring her to Wallowa County,” Lisa Collier said. “Her journey and message is an amazing one and we want all of our county’s students to hear.”

Collier said the Knowledge Bowl was important to watch because Joseph’s knowledge team plans to compete next year.

Another speaker, Dom Tiberi, a well-known sportscaster in Ohio, spoke about losing his daughter to a terrible distracted-driver car accident. This sparked in our students, the idea and need to do a project surrounding the importance and education of distraction-free driving.

“There were so many takeaways from this conference that it’s hard to list them all, but we all feel the fall conference was a game-changer for Joseph FCCLA,” Collier said.