It’s been said, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In Milford, however, life provided roses instead, so the DECA students decided to provide a little aid of their own.

“During Valentines Day we have a flower sale,” said Milford DECA advisor Ed Pregitzer. “We do it as a fund-raising project, but we didn’t plan on bad weather. This is a perishable product. We did a lot of advance planning, except for the weather. We had $600 in flowers, and we had been out the entire week. We knew we needed to do something with them, so we started calling businesses to see if they were in need of flowers. A few years ago, this happened to me, so we looked for another market for them. The flowers were going to die anyway, why not do something with them?”

And do something they did. The annual fund-raiser was in risk of going bust, thanks to a week of closed schools thanks to snow storms. Four seniors, Eric Fancher, Ryan Vonderbrink, Connor Duffy and Adam Norton, were looking for a way to at least utilize the flowers, if not make the expected profit from them. Things were looking grim for the romantic symbols until a former DECA student, Lykins Companies president Jeff Lykins stepped in and covered the cost of the flowers for the students, who had found a good use for the flowers.