TEMPLE, Texas — The Temple High School FFA chapter competed in the Centex District Leadership Development contest at Salado High School earlier this week and brought home a district championship and several other top ten finishes.
The Temple High School Senior Ag Skills Demonstration Team won the district championship and also earned the right to advance to the Area contest. The team is made up of Scarlett Salinas, Angel Esqueda, Makaila Crawford, Shaylin White and Lilah Swanson, with Isabella Waugh serving as Team Prop Manager. The team presented a 20-minute lesson on creating a floral centerpiece from scratch during the competition. Each team member was responsible for specific tasks during the presentation and creation of the centerpiece as the team described their process and designed and built their floral design project. The district championship is the first for a Temple FFA team in a Leadership Development Event (LDE) district contest since prior to 2008. All five members of the team are sophomores or juniors, and three of the five were on the team that advanced to Area competition with a second-place finish at district last year. The students say that experience paid off and are excited about the opportunity to continue in the contest.
“We have worked really hard on our script and making sure that we each had our specific parts down,” Salinas, a junior, said. “It feels good. I’m not sure that any of us really expected to win a district championship, but I think that we are all really happy with the results. We have a lot of confidence going into Area and we expect to continue this, not just into the next contest, but into next year.”
“My jaw was on the floor because I was not expecting to win the whole thing, so we were through the roof when we found out the results,” added Esqueda, also a junior. “I think now we know that we can do this, and we expect to do extremely well at Area and hopefully make it to State.”
The Temple HS chapter also added three other top seven finishes in the contest as every team and individual who competed in the competition placed in the top ten in their event. The FFA Quiz – Senior Level team posted a sixth-place finish. That team is made up of Salinas, Waugh, junior Remy Brown, and senior Gracie Bottoms. Salinas also was the eighth highest scoring individual in that competition and Waugh was the 12th highest scoring individual. The radio broadcasting team of junior Michaela Stelzer, junior Alaina Wood, and sophomore Tatum Ziehr finished in seventh place with a topic focused on antibiotic regulations for livestock animals. Galilea Navarez, a senior, also added a seventh-place finish in Senior Spanish Creed Speaking. Kristi Branton and Monica Kinsey serve as sponsors for the Temple High School FFA chapter.
“This has really been a journey for the last five years because we have made a concentrated effort to improve our performance at LDE’s,” Branton said of the chapter’s performance at the district contest. “We set our expectations really high and I’m not sure we really felt like we reached those until we got our critiques back from the judges. It felt really great as a teacher, and we expect to see that success extend to the rest of our teams and events. We are starting to see that continued improvement really pay off in LDE competition. This year, this team really knows what to expect from Area competition and we again have high expectations.”
The Senior Ag Skills Demonstration team will next compete at the Area 12 LDE Contest in Georgetown on November 23rd. The top two finishers in each event at the Area Contest will advance to the State LDE competition in Huntsville on December 6-7.