Muskego High Junior Taps Business Leadership Skills

Allison Gage, a junior at Muskego High School, has a summer of travel planned, thanks to her successful year of academics. The junior class president in April took part in the 57th annual Wisconsin Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) State Leadership Conference in Appleton and advanced to the National Leadership Conference this summer in Orlando.

Over 2,000 students, advisors, and guests participated in the state conference, which entailed workshop attendance and competitions in various professions.  Allison was installed as the Region VI Vice President, a member of the FBLA State Executive Board. Her duties start in the next couple of weeks, as she meets with other state officers in Madison.

 “We’ll be going to Orlando for the nationals and to attend different leadership conferences there,” said Allison. “My duties kind of start now because I plan for Regionals next year in February. Our region is the largest so it has all the southeastern schools and there should be over 1000 students there and we have to organize it.”

“Freshman year my parents (encouraged me to join) so after I attended the national leaders conference it was just an eye-opening experience,” she said. “They had different motivational speakers, andit was really cool.”

Allison said she’s considering business as a field of study in college, although she’s not much interested in the finance element of it. She rather enjoys community
involvement through projects like fundraising. Last December she took part in
an adopt-a-family event and said it was rewarding.

“We do a lot of stuff like that,” she said of FBLA. “Our big thing is the dodgeball tournament. We call every business in Muskego and ask for donations and sponsorships and it’s a lot of work but half the money we raise goes to March of Dimes.”

This year, they donated almost $4000 to the organization stemming from the April 1 event, she said.

“We had almost 40 middle school teams and 20 some high school teams. It’s a very popular community event,” she said.

Allison also won an essay contest focusing on business leadership, through Foundation for Teaching. She compared her leadership experiences to a circus and was selected as one of 40 students across the country who will travel to UCLA for one week in August to learn about leadership.

“I wrote about a clown car and how it provides chaos and laughter, and somehow everyone seems to make it into the car, and I compared that to me being junior class president,” she said. “Sometimes things were chaotic but everything worked out how it was supposed to.”

She’ll also travel to Spain for 10 days with a school sponsored group and will take a family trip with her parents, Jim and Renee Gage, too.

Having accumulated more than 250 volunteer service hours, Allison is on target to receive the president’s award for volunteerism next year and is also a lifeguard and swim instructor at the YMCA.