Leadership Skills, Awards Abound in Danbury's Students

Danbury seems to have more than it's share of award winning students and we want to recognize them all. We encourage all proud friends and families of other Danbury student award winners to post their names, photos and accompishments to our Comments section and our Photo Gallery. We will be monitoring the gallery for future Whiz Kids, so tell us all about your nominee.  To load your own pictures, look beneath photos in the photo gallery for Add Your Own Photos.

 DECA Awards

Danbury students recently returned from the National DECA Conference in Orlando. There were more than 15,000 students from the US, South Korea, Canada and more making their final business presentations, and Danbury had two student groups that landed in the Top 16 nationally. Danbury High School student Eshan Mehta developed and presented his International Business Plan presentation on his own, while teammates Chris Kenney, Stephen Dickerson and David Colin presented their Public Relations project together.

Dickerson said they thought their first presentation didn't go well and they were surprised when they made it to the second round. “The second one went smoothly,” said teammate Colin David, “and all that pressure was lifted from our shoulders.”

 The method of making the presentations would give most adults an ulcer, and Danbury's students handled it all with aplomb. Carmella Calafiore, teacher for the DECA classes, said that the teen teams had to line up, one after the next, in rows, to do their presentations. 

Rashma Kharawala said that the practice time leading up to the presention took a lot of concentration. “We had a lot of noise behind us and we had to try to overpower what was going on around us.”

 DECA is a popular class with the students, almost all of whom will go on to study business in college. Kharawala recommends DECA to any student, no matter what interests they may be pursuing.  “We have learned team skills, leadership skills, presentations skills...today I had an interview for a scholarship and I was not nervous at all. I knew how to do it. It was so easy, and I learned everything from DECA.”

“Anyone would benefit from DECA.  If you want to be a dancer, you may one day need to know how to run a dance studio,” said Calafiore.

 CABE Awards

 According to the Connecticut Boards of Education Leadership website, CABE awards are given to the top male and female student of high schools and middle schools. Students who are eligible for these awards must exhibit the following skills: “Willingness to take on challenges, capability to make difficult decisions, concern for others, ability to work with others, willingness to commit to a project, diplomacy, ability to understand issues clearly and abilility to honor a commitment.”

 On Wednesday May 11, the Danbury Board of Education announced the awards for this years students.

The following students were the recipients of the awards: At Broadview Middle School, Abigail Miller and Sagar Mehta; Rogers Park Middle School, Alyssa Figuerido and Tiago Souza, and at Danbury High School, last week's Whiz Kid Nadine Edwards and Stephen Dickerson, both of whom just returned from the Orlando DECA conference.