Three Allegan County, Michigan High School Students Compete in International Career Development Conference

Using the SpiritShop.com Student Store Manager program, Joe Allen, Chris Cinka and Chantelle Cooper from the Allegan Area Technical Education Center have earned bids to the International Career Development Conference in Orlando, Fla.

Allegan, MI (PRWeb) April 3, 2007 -- Joe Allen, Chris Cinka and Chantelle Cooper from the Allegan Area Technical Education Center have earned a bid to the International Career Development Conference in Orlando, Fla. in late April. This student trio earned the honor after competing against nearly twenty other teams at the Michigan DECA Conference at the Dearborn Hyatt Regency in March.

These students wrote a thirty page business proposal and presented how they managed to sell custom-made, school-branded apparel to raise money for their program using a new online service at www.SpiritShop.com. Spirit Shop offers a free web site for schools to allow students, parents, teachers and coaches to design and buy school-branded products with up to 15% of the proceeds returning to the sponsoring class. The Ann Arbor based company offers a “Student Store Manager” program modeled after the National Standards for Marketing Education to teach students skills to effectively manage their school’s e-commerce Spirit Shop. The website and program are available to over 110,000 schools nationwide.

I feel very fortunate to have these fine individuals in my class. It is not everyday you can find a group of outstanding young people who can take information from the classroom and apply it to real world situations.

Advisor Sheryl Vaughn says of her students: “I feel very fortunate to have these fine individuals in my class. It is not everyday you can find a group of outstanding young people who can take information from the classroom and apply it to real world situations.”

Allen, a first year marketing student and Cinka, a second year qualifier for the International Career Development Conference are both seniors at Otsego High School and plan to attend business college in the fall. Cooper is a junior at Allegan High School and plans to attend Western Michigan University when she graduates.

• DECA is an international association of high school and college students studying marketing, management, and entrepreneurship in business, finance, hospitality and marketing sales and service.

• SPIRIT SHOP INC. allows individuals in the educational and recreational sports markets to design and purchase their own school, team and club-branded apparel and merchandise online. The company’s digital printing, embroidery and manufacturing technologies allow it to construct and print customized, high quality items at competitive prices with no minimum orders. In addition Spirit Shop’s screen printing capabilities allow it to offer bulk orders at attractive discounts.

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