KO Students Are National Champions at Anaheim, Calif. Conference

Two Keystone Oaks High School alums are national champions after finishing in the top 10 at the National Leadership Conference in Anaheim, Calif. in July.

Emily Valley and Catrina Abbott, who graduated from Keystone Oaks High School in June, took first and seventh places, respectively, in the Word Processing II competition.

The top 10 in the competition are considered National Champions, and the girls are the first from the Keystone Oaks School District to ever receive that designation.

Two more Keystone Oaks students, Kiersten Badzgon and Morgan Leckie, also competed in Desktop Publishing portion of the event and finished just outside of the top 10. The Keystone Oaks FBLA sponsor, Beth Smith, led the team.

"I am extremely proud of all four of the young ladies that represented Keystone Oaks at the National Leadership Conference," Smith said, in a statement released by the district. "They each demonstrated a poise and an elegance well beyond their years and were a credit to our entire community. They are each very well suited to begin their journeys into the highly competitive professional world."  

The four day conference is sponsored by the Future Business Leaders of America-Phi Beta Lambda (FBLA-PBL) to recognize and reward excellence in a range of business and career-related areas, including accounting, business law, entrepreneurship, marketing, technology concepts, and word processing, among others.

The 2013 event featured more than 5,000 students from all 50 states and other territories.

Valley, Abbott, Leckie and Badzgon qualified for the FBLA-PBL's National Awards Program in April after competing in the State Leadership Conference in Hershey.