Nansemond River High School’s Future Business Leaders of America Club is celebrating after student members were successful at the Virginia FBLA State Leadership Conference last weekend.

Economics and personal finance teacher Jason Bartholomew, a club adviser, said three of seven students who competed in individual business competitive events finished in the top five.

Jasmine Hall was second in businesses communications, Justice Boyd fourth in spreadsheet applications and Brandon Adams fifth in securities and investments.

Based on her second-place result, Hall, a junior, earned the chance to compete at the National Leadership Conference in Chicago at the end of June.

“She’s going to go on and compete against the top two in every other state,” Bartholomew said. “It’s quite an achievement for her to be able to say, ‘I’m one of the best in the state, and I’m going to go and see how I compete against the best in the nation.’”

No one at the North Suffolk school can remember any student ever making the FBLA nationals before, according to Bartholomew.

To place second in her event, Bartholomew said, Hall required “a pretty throughout knowledge of how to communicate in business, whether email, proper written communication (or) proper oral communications.”

She also had to demonstrate she could “properly format a sentence” and good grammar, he said.

Bartholomew said the club now has to raise a lot of money to get Hall and at least one adviser to the event. Including travel, the trip will span from June 28 until July 3, he said.

With the cost of flights and hotels, the club needs to raise between $2,000 and $3,000, he said.

The club is currently brainstorming how to raise the money, Bartholomew said, adding, “Our organization tends to do pretty well with car washes.”

Student do at least two of those a year outside the Walgreens on Bridge Road, he said, and each one brings in $400 to $500 for about five hours of work.

“We are trying to get creative at this point, because we are going to have to do more fundraising than we ever have before at the end of the school year,” he said.

Meanwhile, the NRHS students also came home from the state conference officially recognized as members of a 2014-2015 FBLA Honor Chapter.

The FBLA club is one of only a handful in the Tidewater area and the only in Suffolk to achieve the honor, Bartholomew said.