Frisco ISD DECA students win top honors at international competition

Three Reedy High School students from Frisco ISD turned an entrepreneurship challenge into a first-place finish in Atlanta, beating more than 23,000 students from across the globe at DECA’s international competition. Niharika Anand, Diya Balagopal and Shifa Haq won the Innovation Plan event and posed with the trophy after the contest, giving the district one of its clearest national-stage wins of the year.

The Atlanta results did not come out of nowhere. More than 260 Frisco ISD students qualified for the international contest after more than 600 competed at the DECA State Career Development Conference in Dallas in February, where nearly 8,000 students took part. Frisco ISD described that state meet as the largest and most competitive in DECA history, a sign that the district’s business and leadership pipeline is widening, not thinning.

That pipeline starts long before students reach the international stage. DECA’s Innovation Plan event centers on idea generation and opportunity recognition for a new business, product or service, which makes the Reedy trio’s win especially meaningful for a district that has put career and technical education at the center of its academic identity. The competition rewards students who can spot a market need, build a plan and defend it under pressure, skills that translate directly to college, internships and future jobs.

The district also saw a practical payoff: students brought home thousands of dollars in scholarships along with the trophies. DECA says its scholarship program provides more than $200,000 each year to high school and college members, making the awards a real bridge between classroom work and the cost of higher education. For families in Frisco and across Collin County, that kind of recognition can matter as much as the hardware.

Frisco ISD’s showing also built on recent momentum. In 2025, the district said 220 students advanced to the international DECA competition, a large delegation by any standard. This year’s total of more than 260 qualifiers shows a program that is not only sustaining itself but expanding, with students at Reedy and across the district gaining the kind of business fluency, leadership practice and work habits that keep Frisco ISD among Texas’ most closely watched school systems.