Merced Union High School District

Three MUHSD students came away with top five finishes against hundreds of students at the FBLA National Convention last month. 

El Capitan High’s Kaitlyn Holtz and Odalys Orellana teamed up to create a digital animation project that finished fifth at Nationals. Merced High’s Rishabh Saha finished third in the category of Introduction to Financial Math. Congratulations to MUHSD’s FBLA superstars for shining on the national stage and representing their schools and their hometowns so well. 

The El Capitan High team of Kaitlyn Holtz and Odalys Orellana and Merced High’s Rishabh Saha were able to represent the Merced Union High School District and the Merced community by competing at the Future Business Leaders of American National Leadership Conference last month. The trio shined in Anaheim, with Holtz and Orellana finishing fifth in Digital Animation and Saha placing third in Introduction to Financial Math.  “I think the feeling of being at Nationals was almost surreal, in a way, because when we started the competition, we weren't sure we would make it as far as we did,” said Holtz, who will be entering her senior year. We were very proud of ourselves because we put in a lot of hard work and effort into our project.” Saha says it was special representing his high school and home town on a big stage like the FBLA National Conference. “It’s the feeling of representing something bigger than yourself,” said Saha, who is entering his sophomore year. “Representing your school, representing your state, representing your community, all of that. I kind of felt that.”

Saha finished with the top score at the state conference, answering 94 of 100 multiple-choice questions correctly in the 50-minute period. The Introduction to Financial Math category is open to freshmen and sophomores and includes questions that give students an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge around introductory competencies in the area of math relating to business. It’s not the first time Saha found himself competing nationally. As an eighth grader at Cruickshank Middle School, Saha finished seventh in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. in 2024.  “They're kind of different styles,” Saha said. “You know, one of them you have to go up on stage in front of a bunch of people. The other one, you take a test in a room with like 100 other kids” Saha says the common thread between the two events is the opportunity to represent his home town and community. Saha placed third in his event with a score of 81 out of 100 at Nationals, just finishing short of the top score of 83. Saha enjoys the opportunity to compete against top students from around the state and country and the preparation that goes into it. “I think it's just the feeling of improving when you're practicing, and the feeling of knowing that when you're out there competing, that you're the best version of yourself, and that you've put in a lot of work to get there, so I just like the fulfillment.”

Holtz and Orellana’s journey to the national conference started with a classroom project in the El Capitan Animation and Media Arts Pathway class taught by Lauren Duran. The assignment was for students to create a travel log, essentially of their school, introducing it to a new student or teacher. Holtz and Orellana had shared classes before but never really talked to each other until Orellana asked Holtz if she wanted to work on the project together. Over the six months working on the project the two classmates became friends. “Originally we were just meant to do storyboards of what we would do if we were to complete the whole project,” Orellana said. “While doing that, that's kind of where we started, coming up with a script, some storyboards, and what we wanted everything to look like.”

The project focused on El Capitan High’s maxim or core principle, which is “Learn, Love, Lead and Leave a Legacy.” The students used programs like Procreate, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro to complete the project. The students came up with character designs, backgrounds, and everything on the stage was drawn on the page,” Duran said. “They decided to anthropomorphize students. So you have lions, gazelles, there was a deer of some kind, and so they would draw every frame of the characters moving around the screen.” Holtz, Orellana had a third partner in senior Macy Macay who helped them with most of the project and the trio finished fourth at the state conference to qualify for nationals. Macay was unable to participate at nationals so Holtz and Orellana made improvements to the project based on the critique they received from judges at state. 

The El Capitan duo then finished fourth with their project, finishing as the top team from California at nationals. “I am very prideful in the work we did,” Orellana said. “Honestly. I remember throughout the whole thing, we would be so drained, but we would look at each other and say we need to keep going.” Holtz and Orellana became the first team to compete at nationals in digital animation from El Capitan. “The fact that our district was able to let us even have this opportunity to have an animation pathway was a great start,” Duran said. “And then when we saw who we were competing against, schools from the Bay Area and Los Angeles, schools that have more resources than a lot of us do around here. To see that we were able to hold our own with them and do something that judges thought was stronger; I still have trouble wrapping my mind around that. Being able to give these students this opportunity to have their work seen on a national level is something special.”