Shepherdstown Middle School chapter’s hard work pays off at National Leadership Conference

Shepherdstown Middle School FCCLA chapter vice president Lily Nicodemus, left, stands with chapter president Amanda Baeza and chapter member Holly Helwig, whose projects all won awards at the National Leadership Conference in Denver, Colo. at the beginning of July. Tabitha Johnston
SHEPHERDSTOWN — Three of Shepherdstown Middle School’s students returned home earlier this month, after winning big at the National Leadership Conference (NLC) in Denver, Colo.
The conference, held from July 1-6, brought middle school and high school students involved in the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) program together, to present the projects they have worked on over the 2022-2023 school year. Those who competed at the NLC qualified at the state level which, for Shepherdstown Middle School (SMS), was a little easier to accomplish than for most schools, as only a handful of West Virginia’s schools have FCCLA chapters.
“Last year was my first year teaching, so I did FCCLA on the school scale,” said family and consumer sciences teacher Andrea Faith, who is the SMS FCCLA chapter advisor. “I said, ‘Next year we’ll do the traveling competitions, but for now, we need to get our foot in the door to find out what works and what doesn’t for our chapter.’ This year, we were able to start competing!”
While making it to the national level might have been somewhat easygoing, the caliber of two of SMS’s three student projects was clearly far above the passing level.
“At the NLC, students made a project board and shared how Shepherdstown Middle School is making a difference in our community,” Faith said, referring to the competition potential of each community service project as “an afterthought” to the chapter’s members. “Lily Nicodemus and Amanda Baeza, the students who organized our school food drive for Shepherdstown Shares in the spring semester, received national recognition for their project and made the top 10 in the nation for their event. They are the first students from West Virginia to be national finalists! Holly Helwig, another student who competed at nationals, received a gold medal for her ‘Focus on Children’ project, in which she taught art lessons to a preschool class at Children’s Treehouse, to expose young students to the Arts. She was the only student from West Virginia to receive a gold medal at the national level for the 2022-2023 school year!”
While Helwig, who is entering the seventh grade at SMS, will have one more year to compete at the middle school level, Nicodemus and Baeza will be moving on to Jefferson High School’s FCCLA chapter, as they enter the eighth grade this coming school year. After working well together on their project and as the SMS chapter’s vice president and president, respectively, Nicodemus and Baeza said they will likely continue to compete as a group in the future.
“When working within a group, you can distribute the work evenly, so we weren’t too overworked,” Nicodemus said of food drive project. “Together, we made this project better!”
Baeza wholeheartedly agreed with Nicodemus.
“One of the things that caught the judges’ notice is that we work well together,” Baeza said. “We made sure that we carried our own share of the presentation. It was nice to get a breather, instead of carrying all of the weight on our own, because at these competitions it can be very stressful!”
For Baeza, working on the projects together after school inadvertently strengthened her friendships with Nicodemus and Helwig, which she considered to be an unexpected bonus.
“It was a long process, but fun. We got to stay after school and work together,” Baeza said. “We obviously are closer, because of the experience!”