It would be impossible for Republic students to have a better day than they did at the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America regional event. Every Republic competitor received a gold medal and advanced to state competition.
- Culinary Team: Shannon Donohue, Alycia Hauck, Samuel Ard
- Fashion Design: Ashton Rogers
- Fashion Construction: Emma Thompson
- Food Innovation: Sierra Watson
- Leadership: Kaylee Weaver
- Professional presentation: Ethan Dalton
- Repurpose and Redesign: Hailli Pierce
- Career Investigation: Shealyn Barrett
Culinary team members Shannon Donohue, Samuel Ard, and Alycia Hauck won gold in their competition, which involved preparing a meal at the STAR event. Two of them, Donohue and Hauck, brought very different experience levels to the competition.
“I had not really been into anything cooking-related,” said Donohue, who first got involved in the kitchen in Mrs. Andrea Carter’s pastry class at the high school. “One day, she was like, ‘Would you want to be on ?’ And I ended up really liking it. So it was kind of a spontaneous thing that happened and I got really into it.”
Hauck grew up helping her parents in the kitchen, but found the culinary competition to be a much different experience.
“The technique is so specific – if you do one little thing and it changes from a julienne to a fine julienne. It’s a lot more difficult,” she said.
In some ways, her experience in the kitchen was a disadvantage. “When I cook with my parents, I hold the knife a certain way. But … here, you weren’t allowed to do that because it was a safety hazard, apparently. So I had to retrain my brain to hold it … a certain way.”
Emma Thompson’s gold in fashion construction involved sewing a dress, and she excelled despite having little experience outside of a couple of classes. She settled on a pattern after rejecting her initial idea because it didn’t match her vision after she started putting it together. She was most surprised by the “how many intricate little things there are when building a clothing article like that. I thought it would be easy, and there were a lot more little problems that I never even dreamed of,” she said.
Sierra Watson earned gold in food innovations. The competition required her to prepare a vegetarian entreé and report on the process of fine-tuning and perfecting it.
She started with a recipe that included tofu, because of its protein content, but found that the original tofu chow mein recipe was “very bland and … colorless.” For color, Watson added vegetables, including sugar snap peas, carrots, and mushrooms; then she included ramen noodles.
“When we changed to the ramen, it also added the texture that we were missing, along with the sugar snap peas,” she said.
The competition not only taught her how to change a recipe to please a target audience, it also showed her a personal lesson: “I’m a very picky eater, but I’ve learned you can find your way around being a picky eater if you know how to prepare your own food,” she said.
Students will compete at the FCCLA State Leadership Conference March 15-17 at Osage Beach.