Mrs. Perez could not be prouder of how the Benito FBLA chapter performed at the FBLA State Conference March 12-15th in Orlando. There are 28 FBLA districts in the state of Florida and over 6,000 students competed. Please join me in congratulating the students, their perseverance showed!

Congratulations to our All-County Band and Orchestra Musicians: Juliet Berman, Georgia Hammond, Ethan Lentz, and Emanuel Jerald represented Benito Middle School in the 2026 Hillsborough Secondary Music Council All-County Band and Orchestra Festivals in February! Being selected for All-County is a huge accomplishment, as only the top musicians were chosen and these talented students dedicated many hours preparing for this performance. Please join us in celebrating their hard work and incredible achievement. Way to go, Benito musicians!

Students have been working with Mr. Couilliard to buildi and code robots to move down a hallway. The group whose robot travels in the shortest time wins. We are using Micro:Bits for the microprocessors and block coding on makecode.microbit.org.

Benito 7th grader Hridaan Waswani was to be part of the 2026 Team Hillsborough and represent our district at the Florida State Science and Engineering Fair Competition for his invention of a "Smart AI Trash Can." He will move on from the Hillsborough Regional level to the State level to compete on March 31-April 2.

Benito's Game and Simulation students participated in the HCPS Game Jam on February 24. Ishan Ramakrishnan, Sanay Srivastava, and Braden Kidd placed 2nd in Tier 2 Minecraft. Monessh Vigneshwaran, Vedang Pala, Safwan Mohamed Ashiq, and Keshav Kanani placed 3rd in Tier 4 Unity. The Benito teams, led by CTE Teacher Mrs. Perez, competed against middle and high school students who are taking Game and Simulation courses in Hillsborough County Congratulations!