The Perry High School SkillsUSA Team competed recently at the National Leadership and Skills Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, and they held their own against schools from across the country.

The first three days of the week-long event were devoted to leadership training, which was attended by four Perry students — Kaden Boyer, Rylynn Gilmore, Sierra Newton, and Dalton Scott — who will be serving as Iowa SkillsUSA state officers for the next year. The rest of the time was devoted to competitions, during which the students from Perry participated in a wide range of events. According to Superintendent Clark Wicks, the Perry attendees performed very well, with two of them even netting a place in the top 10 of their categories: Kaylyn Bousman in Extemporaneous Speaking and Gilmore in Nurse Assisting, with both finishing in 6th place.

Wicks points out, the most impressive aspect of the Perry team’s results is they attend a general education high school, as opposed to the technical schools many of the other participants attend. “The thing that both instructors talked about, Curt Cornelius and Chad Morman, was that they were competing against schools who for a large part of their day are in industrial tech-related activities. So they were competing against those types of students at this national conference and competition, and they did very, very well!”

Wicks adds, the SkillsUSA program at Perry will only continue to grow once the new industrial technology facility at the high school is finished, which is expected to be prior to the 2020-21 school year. See below for a full list of results from the National SkillsUSA Conference. To learn more about this and other Perry School District topics, click the link below to listen to the most recent Perry Fareway Let’s Talk Dallas County program with Wicks.

https://www.raccoonvalleyradio.com/2019/08/13/lets-talk-dallas-county-8-13-2019-clark-wicks/

Kaylyn Bousman — 6th place, Extemporaneous Speaking
Rylynn Gilmore — 6th place, Nurse Assisting
Charley Guardado — 17th place, Automobile Maintenance and Light Repair
Taylor Eppert, Sierra Newton, and Kaden Boyer — 21st place, Promotional Bulletin Board
Lanie Fish — 23rd place, First-Aid CPR
Kaleigh Hein — 24th place, Motorcycle Service Technology
Alex Fickbohm — 29th place, Power Equipment Technology
Mason Barkley — 34th place, Carpentry