Speech & Debate Team News

It was another busy weekend for our speech & debate team! We had our largest entry ever at the Spartan Fall Classic at Schurr High School in Montebello. This also turned out to be the largest Spartan Fall Classic on record— over 50 teams from up and down the state of California arrived to compete.  

 

All of our debaters did very well. Several going two wins and one loss in the preliminary rounds, and just about everyone won at least one round of debate. As you can see from the included picture, freshmen Meg Kalaw and Jocelle Lauron trophied at semi-finals in novice public forum debate, which meant they were in the top four out of 32 teams from 15 schools including traditional powerhouse school, San Marino!

 

As you know, it takes a special kind of courage to put yourself out there and speak in public— so we are especially proud of our international students who (though they don’t often break to out-rounds) work so hard to be competitive in speech and debate in a language that is not their home language! And they ARE competitive. For example, Genesis Li and Erin Li came in fourteenth out of 29 teams in varsity public forum debate and Tayvans Zhang was in the top 20 out of 40 among the novice Lincoln/Douglas debaters. Their victories are of a different sort, but no less remarkable.

 

Thanks to all of you for your kind support and encouragement to the team!