On Wednesday, February 11, seniors Kirstin Pullins and Sierra Sanders, along with junior Naomi Baker gave a DECA presentation to the Spanish classes in Spanish. The students, who are both DECA students and Spanish students, decided to do this for their DECA project on Financial Literacy.

“We talked about wants versus needs, budgeting, writing checks, credit versus debit and saving,” said Kirstin Pullins.

Even though the project’s topic was simple, presenting it in Spanish was not.

“We met with each other a lot and made a PowerPoint and rehearsed a lot,” said Pullins. “It was hard. It took a couple of weeks.”

The presenters were attracted to the idea of presenting in a foreign language because it was unprecedented.

“We decided to do the presentations in Spanish because we wanted to do something that was unique. We found these really cool pamphlets teaching students how to be financially literate, so we thought we could hit a lot more students by going into Spanish-speaking classes,” said Naomi Baker.

The Financial Literacy project is done each year, although this year certainly presented a new twist.

“The idea to do this was a combination of all of us, we just thought it was a different idea to present financial literacy. We’ve done this project each year and each year we grow on it. Last year we did the presentation as the game of Life. We thought it was stale so we switched to doing it in Spanish and we have other stuff along the way,” said DECA teacher Mr. Eric Wagner.

The presentations were made to Ms. Janelle Ehninger’s Spanish classes, who said she didn’t help the presenters at all.

“It was fantastic. The girls had a great presentation and I think the students had great presenters,” said Ehninger. “I was impressed by the vocabulary they learned and the fact they could do it Spanish, and it’s hard to do it in front of your peers.”

After the classes were over, the team felt positive about their presentations.

“It went better than we thought it would, and the students learned a lot too,” said Pullins.

The trio will now complete a thirty-page paper on financial literacy, with the goal of placing at State and then Nationals.