In addition to two of our students qualifying earlier this year to compete in the LifeSmartsChallenge Quarter Finals, Will garret and Nathan Simpkins made it to the Semifinals. They began their virtual National FBLA LifeSmarts competition on March 12th in a pool of 24 teams. This same duo also competed and placed 1^st Nationally in the Virtual Business Management Challenge! By doing so, they won $1000. They will be recognized for this achievement at the National Leadership Conference in Chicago, IL this summer.

Congratulations to Will (Robert) Garrett and  Nathan Simpkins.

Want to know more about what the LifeSmartsChallenge entails?

For LifeSmarts, Will & Nate had to take a series of online tests on the 5 LifeSmarts topics (Personal Finance, Consumer Rights, Technology, Environment, and Health & Safety). With their combined score on these tests, they qualified in the top 24 teams in the nation to compete yesterday and today. For the National event, Will & Nate had to take another online test earlier this week. Yesterday, in the first 2 rounds of competition, they competed in buzzer rounds against 3 other teams in each round (placing 2nd in their first round and 1st in their second round). These buzzer rounds consisted of questions on the 5 LifeSmarts topics (think ItsAcademic or Quiz Bowl – very similar!).

Want to know more about what the Virtual Business Management Challenge entails?

The FBLA Virtual Business Management Challenge encourages FBLA members to test their skills at managing either a bicycle manufacturing business or a blue jeans manufacturing business. Students will be limited as to which concepts they are able to control during each of the qualifying rounds. What participants control will include various combinations of the following concepts: recruiting/hiring/supervising employees, risk management, organizing floor layouts, bidding on orders, and more. For each round, teams will be ranked based on their business' cumulative profit after running the simulation for six virtual months." https://knowledgematters.com/highschool/competitions/fbla/

On behalf of the FBLA Advisers,

Anne Chapman

TJ Finnerty

Don Malkowski

Jill Stickel