Niles North Students Named DECA National Emerging Leaders

Press release from Niles Township High Schools District 219:

May 15, 2020

Prasanna Bharatia and Peter Warda, seniors at Niles North High School in Skokie, Illinois, are two of only nine students in the State of Illinois to receive the 2020 DECA National Emerging Leader Honor Award. This award recognizes students studying marketing, finance, hospitality, and management for an academically prepared, community oriented, professionally responsible, experienced leader through participation in DECA. The award recipient must be a DECA member in his/her senior year of high school with a cumulative grade point average of 3.2 or better for each of the high school semesters. The Niles North DECA chapter advisors are Jean Attig and Nick Pahl.

In addition to this award, they would have received 2 of ONLY 21 Illinois Foundation of Marketing Honor Awards at this year’s IL-DECA Career Development Conference that was to be held in March but was ultimately cancelled along with this year’s DECA International Career Development Conference that was to be held in Nashville in April. These two students qualified for both of these conferences last year and most certainly would have repeated this year with even more success as our chapter’s Co-Presidents and our business, DECAdent Delightz’s, Operating Vice-Presidents. Along with running this business during the school year, they wrote a 20-page comprehensive research paper and a professional presentation that would have competed in the Project Management Sales Project competition.

Prasanna has committed to DePaul University in the fall with an intended double major in International Business and Business Management & Administration She is the daughter of Shreya Vakharia of Skokie and Taral Bharatia of Chicago.

Peter has committed to DePaul University in the fall with an intended major in Marketing. He is the son of Samira and Nabil Warda of Skokie.

DECA is a career and technical student organization composed of more than 225,000 students who are interested in careers in marketing, entrepreneurship, finance, hospitality or management. DECA enhances the preparation for college and careers by providing co-curricular programs that integrate into classroom instruction, apply learning, connect to business and promote competition. DECA student members leverage their DECA experience to become academically prepared, community oriented, professionally responsible, experienced leaders. For more information about DECA, visit http://www.deca.org.

This press release was produced by Niles Township High Schools District 219. The views expressed here are the author’s own.