Family, Career and Communications Leaders of America, or FCCLA, is a nonprofit national Career and Technical Education (CTE) club for students in Family and Consumer Sciences classes. The goal of FCCLA is to help students and teachers focus on a variety of youth concerns. This includes parenting, family relationships, substance abuse, peer pressure, sustainability, nutrition and fitness, teen violence, mental health, and spreading awareness.

The FCCLA club at Arlington High School has been focusing lately on spreading awareness and encouraging good mental health. To kickstart their club, the FCCLA chapter at AHS hosted Breast Cancer Awareness month. Club members spent after-school and during school hours to make posters advertising the event, and create ribbons for students to wear in order to show their support. During lunch students could come and visit the FCCLA table, grab a ribbon, and sign their name on a Breast Cancer Awareness poster to show additional support.

In the month of November, the club took on the challenge to show thankfulness. Funds were used to buy and put together Thankful baskets for the security personnel and police officers on campus as well as school nurses. Each basket contained goodies and a note from the club expressing their gratitude for them. “We feel like sometimes they’re overlooked and the main focus is on teachers. So we wanted to do something special for them and show that we’re thankful for them”, said Mellissa Humphries, the club’s sponsor. The week before Thanksgiving break, club members went out and delivered these baskets to each person.

FCCLA’s most recent activity, this month, was targeted more towards teachers and administrators. The time around the holidays can be happy, fun, sad, or hectic for some people. In order to give our AHS staff some holiday cheer, FCCLA decided to handcraft candy grams for teachers and administrators. A member of the club, Molly Magowan, had this to say: “Not everything has to be big and extravagant. The little things are just as important and can be just as impactful”. Each member of the club created their own messages to put on a cards, paired them with candy, and handed the candy grams out.

Though the club is starting out small, FCCLA plans to start doing bigger things for people at AHS. This includes staff and students. This year, FCCLA’s world-wide theme is inspiration. The officers of the club say they want FCCLA to evolve from simple handouts and start being more interactive in the community and inspire connections and service in the community. However, the community starts with the people around you like the students and staff at Arlington High. So they will continue to progress and slowly start bigger projects for later on in the school year.