HOSA club to head to Florida
Courtesy of Madera Unified School District
From left are members of Madera South High School’s award-winning HOSA club: Gabriella Herrera, Maria Ramirez Juarez, Esteban Aparicio Morelos, Leslie Gutierrez, Valeria Palomares, Anahi Salazar, Adrian Godoy, and Diana Cortez-Jimenez. Absent is member Rachel Gutierrez.
Members of Health Occupation Students of America hope to head to the Walt Disney World Resort this summer to compete in an international leadership conference.
“It’s going to cost about a thousand dollars per student to send them there, and that will include hotel, airfare and registration” explained HOSA advisor Mary Pietrowski, a teacher at Madera South High School. “So we need to get our fundraising done by May 14. But we have a lot of work to do between now and then.”
In addition to future fundraising, MSHS’s HOSA club has a Go Fund Me campaign accepting donations online at gf.me/u/r2d44a.
The theme of this year’s conference will be “Define Your Purpose.”
Qualifying to attend the June 19-22 conference in Orlando, Florida, was no easy feat. Ten of 55 MSHS members won recognition competing in health care-related events at the HOSA State Leadership Conference in Sacramento at the end of March. Most of the students who competed couldn’t afford to attend, so HOSA had to raise funds to cover the $150 cost per student.
Diana Cortez-Jimenez took first place with a gold award in a nursing assistant event, which included a written test and a skill demonstration. Esteban Aparicio-Morelos (gold), Anahi Salazar (bronze), Rachel Gutierrez (bronze) and Adrian Godoy won Barbara James Service awards. Maria Ramirez Juarez, Gabriella Herrera, and Leslie Gutierrez received recognition for raising funds for the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation, this year’s HOSA national service project.
Valeria Palomareas earned a recognition award for the chapter newsletter, HOSA Happenings, and Eddie Ramon-Gonzalez was chosen as a possible voting delegate representing California.
HOSA has 203 members at Madera South High School.
