Courtesy of Erie County Technical School
Students from Erie County Technical School earned the silver medal and national recognition at the SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Confrence in Atlanta, Georgia.
Students Kori Bement, Alex Beers, and Eli Stonestreet Northeast, Northwestern, and McDowell high schools all won medals for their work in Computer Networking and a project, The Flower Basket.
The team presented their project to a panel of judges and participated in a public exhibition for over 19,000 conference attendees at the Georgia World Congress Center.
The team competed against 109 teams throughout six career clusters showcasing projects that utilized the technical knowledge that they gained during their years at technical schools across the country.
Their project applied technical knowledge to manufacture paper flowers and distributing them to community members including residents at a local nursing home, Nightingale Nursing and Rehab Center.
The students partnered with Velocity Network for guidance on project development, website creation, and marketing strategies.
The website is available online here to the public with the mission statement below:
“Many community spaces, such as nursing homes, hospitals, and other locations, lack brightness. At The Flower Basket, our mission is to change that and bring light to the locations that need them the most. We provide paper flowers to nursing homes, hospitals, and other locations which need the brightness the most to spread some light to them. When spaces are bright, people in those spaces thrive. Whether they’re a resident in a nursing home, patient in a hospital, or just someone who needs some brightness in their life, we are there to help bring them that positivity. Our goal is to foster spaces which are brighter in ways that don’t fade.”
Romeo Castillo Soto of McDowell another student of ECTS was recognized in the Immersive Construction Experience, after winning a competitive application process to attend.
Throughout the week, he networked with top executives from industry, such as Lowe’s, Bosch, Komatsu, Aerotek, and America’s Best Choice.
He was also able to tour large-scale job sites such as Atlanta Braves stadium, was trained in skills and earned credentials, and gained experience to advance his career in the high-demand construction field.
To learn more about the school that proved these four children with the opportunity to progress in their fields check out their website here.