Valley County Students Compete At State BPA

A handful of Glasgow High School students competed in the Business Professionals of America (BPA) State Conference in Billings that took place March 12 through 14. Winter storms, which resulted in road closures, prevented the students from arriving as scheduled on Saturday, March 11, so unfortunately the group arrived approximately five hours late the following day, only getting two hours to compete in a lot of the competitions.

"Our parliamentary procedure team did not even get the chance to compete. We were told they would try and push our competitions back but some of them were out of luck. We, for obvious reasons, were not as competitive as we would have liked and expected to be," stated advisor Jill Page.

Even though winter weather caused unexpected delays, there were some individual successes. Daniel Berry placed as State Champion as a result of achieving first in Server Administration using Microsoft. He competed against the whole state of Montana and all of the divisions in order to bring home the title. Mary Dykema took seventh in Economic Research individual and Gabe Munroe took ninth in computer network technology.

Berry automatically qualified to attend Nationals in Anaheim, Calif., later this year while Dykema and Munroe still could get bumped up to be able to attend Nationals, based upon what event their competitors will compete in during Nationals if they placed in the top 10 in multiple events.

In addition to the individual placings, Munroe was also awarded the Stateman Torch award, which is individually based with the criteria of satisfying levels in the categories of hope, faith, love, cooperation, knowledge, service, leadership, friendship and patriotism. James Seekins was also recognized for being the Glasgow's chapter President and Eli Feezell and Seekins were awarded the Recruiter Award.

Opheim students Aliah Batalla and John Yeska also competed and according to advisor Becky Rogenes, they did awesome. Batalla placed second in Health Insurance/Medical Billing and fourth in C# Programming, qualifying her for Nationals automatically. Yeska placed sixth in financial literacy and seventh in Human Resource Exploration. Though Yeska did not place in the top five to automatically qualify for the National competition in his categories, he was able to bump up in the Financial Literacy competition and now qualifies to attend.

The State BPA Clubs together raised $16,013.72 for Special Olympics, who were able to attend the State Competition to accept the check and speak to the group of 1,700 advisors and students from all over the state.

BPA's mission is to contribute to the preparation of global professionals through the advancement of leadership, citizenship, academic and technological skills.

In order to help assist Berry with costs associated with going to Nationals, Pizza Hut is having a give back night on Tuesday, March 28, where a percentage of the purchase will go to GHS Business Professionals of America. Page is also accepting donations at GHS, Attention: Jill Page, Box 28, Glasgow, MT 59230.