Originally set to occur mid-January, Park’s talent show has been canceled due to a lack of auditions. According to one of the event organizers, freshman Nahilii Ahmed, the show was planned as a DECA project.

“I tried to promote it as best as I could, but with teenagers these days, it’s kind of hard to get attention around stuff like this,” Ahmed said. “Not enough people auditioned for it, which is why we canceled it. My teacher and I kept extending audition dates and such, but it just didn’t work.”

Ahmed said the idea initially started as a joke between the organizers, eventually sprouting into a viable idea.

“At first, when (the) group and I got together, we were thinking of things to do and were joking around about doing a big talent show, but as we kept thinking, that was (the) only thing that really stuck out,” Ahmed said.

According to DECA teacher Abby Lugo, the goal of the talent show was to gather money for DECA through admission fees, with that goal changing as the project evolved. Eventually, it was understood between the group that the growth in the community that a talent show could catalyze was of far greater value than any potential profit.

“Originally, we planned to charge money for people to get into the talent show, and we’d give the proceeds to DECA,” Lugo said. “As we talked and it was developing, we wanted to maintain that it was free for all students, and so we then planned to just charge outside guests and families. In that sense, we knew going in that it might not be very profitable, and not result in a huge donation for DECA, but the community-building and the fun that could be had from it would be worth it.”

Reflecting on the cancellation, junior Lotus Deuel, a potential act, said they were surprised and saddened by the lack of auditions.

“In the email that they sent out about the cancellation, there were only two people it was addressed to, so I was like, ‘dang, nobody else cared’,” Deuel said. “I thought that there would be more than two people. There were posters and everybody saw them.”

After putting in so much energy towards planning and marketing the event, Ahmed said she was disappointed with the turnout.

“I had high hopes. I was really excited because I’ve never planned anything big like this before,” Ahmed said. “I was kind of bummed out when nobody auditioned. I was like “wow, I did all of this work for no auditions’.”

Even with the cancellation, Lugo said the project can still be considered a success through the things learned by the students.

“Even though the talent show is no longer going to run, the students still had to do a lot of things to lead up to that to have that result, so they’re still managing a project,” Lugo said. “Just because it didn’t result in what we intended it to do, doesn’t mean that they didn’t learn things along the way.”

Although it didn’t work out this time, Ahmed said she would still be interested in attempting a talent show in the future.

“When everything goes back to ‘normal,’ I’m going to try it again, either in my sophomore or junior year,” Ahmed said.