The school’s Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) students advanced to the state competition after competing on Jan. 23 at Haltom High School against other District 7 schools like Allen, Flower Mound, and Marcus High School. State will be held on Feb. 23-25 in San Antonio.

“It’s such a little shock, like you sit there at district and you just hope your name gets called while they go through everyone else’s name and you’re just waiting,” senior officer Scout Dawson said. “But when you finally hear your name, you don’t believe it’s actually happening. Being my last year, I was excited that I got another chance to go to state.”

At state, members will compete in their specific business orientated event in order to qualify for International Career Development Conference (ICDC) in California.

“Ideally, I hope to go to ICDC,” DECA president Simran Sohal said. “[We] have a lot of fun, make memories, and make it a good last year for Hebron DECA because I will be graduating soon.”

This year, 60 members competed and 40 members advanced to state. A majority of the members are first-year competitors.

“Every year is different,” sponsor Julie Siefert said. “Primarily, we have a lot of students competing in different events from years passed. We have a lot of new members this year; about three quarters of our students going are brand new first year competitors compared to last year.”

DECA is a high school organization for students and teachers interested in marketing, management and entrepreneurship in business, finance, hospitality, and marketing. Competition consists of individuals or team members finding solutions in a given scenario for their event.

“The officers lead the meetings, that lead the practice sessions that help prepare for studying,” Siefert said. “Students have a lot of online outside resources to help them and primarily studying terms related to their event so that they can take the exam and also prepare for the role play with quizzes and the Kahoots we play in class.”

The club has expanded compared to previous years and the team prepared more with mandatory sessions and outside meetings to improve their performance.

“It’s exciting to see those people who have asked me questions compete at state,”  Sohal said. ”I know we have studied a lot and it’ll be exciting to see how your chapter does as a whole. I think we are going to do pretty well because we prepared more with practice sessions so hopefully a lot of people qualify.”