On March 16 through 18, the FCCLA state competition was held in Athens, Georgia. The winners from Heritage include Isabelle Hill and Bryce McDaniel with their “Unfinished;” project and Kaitlyn Gordy who won the Statesman award. For her Statesman award, Kaitlyn Gordy took a 50 question test on the founding of FCCLA up until now. When asked about what it was like to win, she said, “I didn’t think I was going to [win], but it was pretty cool to walk across stage.” Juniors Isabelle Hill and Bryce McDaniel first started talking about doing this project around last March, but at the time, they felt like they were not ready to do something like that. Then after Nathan Leal’s death, Isabelle Hill told me that she got a call from Bryce, and the two of them decided that they wanted to do it.

As soon as they could, they spoke to the school counselor Ms. Allen, the FCCLA sponsor Ms. Cooper, and then Mr. Bradford. After a lot of time, work, getting school board approval, and weekly meetings, some of their plans were finally put into action. Along with the founders, there was also a team that worked on the “Out of the Darkness” campus walk and a student team that helped to put things out during the school week to let everyone know about the events. After several school events, they had the state competition. According to Isabelle Hill, “After we walked out and made the judges cry, we felt pretty good about it, but didn’t want to get our hopes up.” Since their regional competition was canceled because of many people having the flu, the state competition was their first time in front of a panel. When asked why she felt the idea behind this “Unfinished;” project was so important to get across to students, Isabelle responded, “After we had lost two students… we were kind of afraid to talk about it… It was important for us to tell students that one: you’re not done, and two: you have a support system. We wanted people to know they’re not alone.” In July, they will go to the national competition in Nashville, Tennessee.