Green Hope has had three well known CTSOs (Career and Technical Student Organizations) for at least several years: Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA), Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA) and Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA). However, unknown to many students is a fourth CTSO: SkillsUSA. Aubrey Green (‘26), joined SkillsUSA as a founding member back in 2023. “I happened to see a poster about Skills and I thought, “Oh that sounds interesting,” she said.
SkillsUSA is an organization dedicated to helping students become skilled professionals, mainly in trade jobs. At Green Hope there are three divisions to SkillsUSA: Health Care, Computer Science and Media & Art. Green explained that she joined the Media & Art division because she wanted to delve into video editing after taking Green Hope’s Adobe Video Editing class in freshman year.
“I wanted to do more in video editing because I found it fascinating when I took the Adobe video editing class back in my freshman year,” she said. However, even though she joined the club with the aim to do more with video editing, she ended up competing in the T-shirt design event.
Throughout the school year, she drafted a T-Shirt that the Green Hope chapter members would bring to the SkillsUSA conference in Greensboro, NC, where she would then show it off to judges and other competitors. Along with being graded on her T-shirt design, she also had to do an oral presentation and was questioned by the judges. “It was really nerve-racking,” said Green, “But really fun.”
Even though a majority of the CTSOs at Green Hope are established and have solidified their organizational structure, the members of SkillsUSA faced some challenges as they tried to navigate their first year.
“We were just starting to figure out the organization and we had to figure out how the competitions worked… it was a lot of just figuring stuff out because it was our first year,” Green described. After an inaugural year with only seven members, Green described that as SkillsUSA starts its second year, the club has finally started to expand with a wave of new members and an understanding of how competitions work. Green is very optimistic that SkillsUSA will grow this current year. “This year we’re more prepared, we’ve grown a lot… I’m excited for the new year.”
As Green herself prepares for the coming competition, she hopes to compete in video production. “As interesting as it was creating a T-shirt design, I really do love editing, and I think that making a short film fits my skill set more, especially my creativity.” When she goes to compete in Greensboro she will be given a theme, and she will have only a couple days to write, plan, film and edit a short film that’s based around that theme. She noted that the competition would be challenging – but she was up for it. “It’s going to be really hard to get everything done under that short of a time frame, but I think I can do it. No, I know I can do it.”
