Three Powell County High School students who competed in the Family Career and Community Leaders of America brought home medals awarded to them for their performance in the clubs National Competition that was held during the first week of July in Nashville, Tennessee.
Kaylee Lane and Noah Perry were both awarded with a gold medal for their group performance in the Illustrated Talk category during the 2017 National Conference. Gabby Conley was awarded a silver medal for her individual performance in the “Teach and Train” category. Kaylee Lane and Noah Perry did a project regarding single parent homes called “Nurturing the Non-nuclear” about how to build a single parent home a weak family structure and make it stronger. “We tried to gives a lot of examples of how you can take a family that has been broken and make it just as strong as a normal two-parent family that was our end goal was to give people some ideas of what they can do to get a closer relationship with their children or parents,” Perry said. “One of the things that we focused on was having dinner together and being able to know when you need outside like counseling and it focused on things like love, trust and respect in a family whether that family was divorced, adopted family or foster family,” Lane said. “No matter what kind of non-nuclear kind of family it is that you need to have respect and balance within the family.” “Part of it being illustrated talk meant we had physical visuals that we could show so we used a particular illustration with a flower pot likening the flower pot to a family in that the flower pot nurtures the flower so that it can grow just like a family would for for a child,” Perry said. “We break the flower pot as a symbol of a divorce, death of a parent or a family splitting up and we used those examples to help put the pot back together with tape with that those kinds of things written on them.”
Advisor says that she believes that the illustration of the flower pot was important because it showed symbolism of how it used to be broken but it was taped back together and all though it may not look perfect that it can still be used to grow a flower cause an imperfect family can grow a really child at the same time. “To be recognized for the gold medal means a lot to us because we put a lot of work into it and its something thats close to our hearts not because of any personal experiences but because we both come from nuclear families but we see that our hometown is stricken with broken families so its important to make it known that non-nuclear families are any less than nuclear families,” Lane said.
“As FCCLA members we try to strive to have pride in where we are from and in our roots its a pretty big deal to us to do something like this that can really effect the fibers of your community and try to fix some of the issues we see here,” Perry said. Gabby Conley won a silver medal during the individual competion for creating a lesson that could be used to teach a group of students or co-workers in the “Teach and Train” category. “I had to choose a career so I chose to be a middle school math teacher and I created a lesson corresonding to a problem concerning low test scores in middle school math relating to multi-step equations,” Conley said. “You could choose anything as long as taught or trained a lesson.”
Conley had went to the Powell County Middle School taught a lesson to 8th graders about how to solve multi-step equations just to make their test scores better at the end of the year. Conley says that during the previous years that the test scores were low not just in the community of Powell County but nationwide. “I had to do a lot of research and had to do a self-assessment so I had to look deep down inside of myself and figure out why I wanted to do this particular career,” Conley said. “I figured out that I really like teaching after it was all said and done. I feel like that I could make a career out of this.” Conley says that she gave students a test at the beginning of the lesson and at the end of the lesson and she says she was able to see the improvement in the test scores that could be attributed to her lesson improving the students knowledge and ability to better solve multi-step equations. “From pre-to-post test the students had gained over 35 percentage points of knowledge.” Conley said. “Their average test scores from the pre-test was a 65 percent by the end of the lesson and by doing the post-test they had 95 percent average.” Conley says that after discovering how successful her teaching methods were while she was participating in the FCCLA National Competition that she is now considering a career path teaching family and consumer sciences. “I just feel very passionate about the subject and how it it has effected me because it has caused me to be a better person,” Conley said.