The Montgomery County Middle School Family, Career and Community Leaders of America chapter has added another national award to its already growing trophy case.

The FCCLA organization selected the MCMS chapter as the national winner for the Financial Fitness Award. The chapter will receive a $1,000 award and will be recognized at the FCCLA National Leadership Conference this summer in Seattle, Wash.

“There are only seven middle school national awards given in the nation, one for each national program,” FCCLA adviser Jan Hankinson said. “So literally, out of all of the middle school chapters in the nation, we won one of the seven awards, which is pretty impressive. So it’s a big deal.”

Chapters will receive the Financial Fitness award based on projects that are made to help the youth learn skills in managing money and planning financially.

A project of eighth-grade student Cohen Beattie helped the chapter win the national award. Cohen’s project is called the $10 meal challenge, which helped students learn how to financially plan on buying items of a healthy meal for a family of four. The meal should be well-balanced with fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy and protein.

Hankinson said that Cohen’s project taught students that buying food is expensive and families can save by cooking food themselves.

“He came into my eighth-grade classes to do presentations on the $10 meal challenge,” the adviser said. “That was his STAR event project. He won the gold medal at state on that and advanced to nationals with that, which is great. But then, I took what my students did and I wrote about that for the FCCLA award. That’s how we were able to get that. He was kind of the instigator in starting it, then we implemented it in all of my FACS classes and repeated it again this semester.”

Cohen finished second in professional presentation for his project at the state conference, which was held in March at the Lake of the Ozarks, and qualified for nationals. He is also one of seven MCMS students who plans to head out to Washington state. The others are Brady Falloon, Lydia Zerr, Alaina Spurgeon, Anna Johnson, Aurora Gibson and Alyssa Davis.

MCMS won chapter awards in financial fitness, community service and student body, received a FCCLA administrator of the year award and had 16 of its students earn medals for their projects at the state conference two months ago.

Hankinson said the MCMS chapter was contacted in April that it won a national award for Financial Fitness.

“It was a happy day,” Hankinson said. “The great thing is we get another $1,000, which will help the kids go to nationals and help kind of give a base to start next year with, which is nice.”