Trevor Ponsen | Writer
September 7th, 2023
Last year, a small group of students including myself worked endlessly to bring a speech and debate program and class to our high school, only for us to met with failure — even though we took all the necessary steps.
Last year, myself, now senior Anthony Wu and senior Nicolle Generaux started the school’s first Speech and Debate Club. We planned to use the club to find qualified members for our team so we could confidently compete in debate competitions. It ran smoothly most of the year: we were able to run weekly practices every Friday that Mrs. Dutton and Mr. Ho would supervise, while Anthony Wu would lead most of the exercises. We wanted to turn this from an unofficial, student-ran group to being a legitimate class at our high school; our club even had Mr. Ho agree to teach the class.
This vision would not come to fruition, in spite of all of our efforts. We got the class added in on aeries as an elective option for students, and we were told that we only needed 30 people to sign up for it in order for it to become a class the following year. We tried to advertise the class through a variety of means, the most controversial being when Mr. Ho and Mrs. Dutton sent out an email to English teachers, urging them to encourage their students to consider Speech and Debate as an elective for next year.
The e-mail strategy was met with backlash from the office and vague emails that called it “inappropriate,” but we never received a specific reason for why we couldn’t sent the email. Anthony Wu had this to say on the topic: “from Cat Nolan’s perspective, this was after registration and it might mess with people’s schedules and make it hard on the counselors because people would be adding a new class. Maybe they didn’t want to deal with that, I don’t know; but at the same time it’s a bit sketchy of them.”
Because we weren’t allowed to advertise it other than word-of-mouth with people, we only got around 30 people to sign up — which, at the time, we thought was enough. However, we found out at this year’s registration that we would not be receiving a speech and debate class as an option because we needed 50 people for it to be a class. Whether they changed it on us or we were just misinformed at the start with how many people we needed, we’ll never know, but it’s been made clear that the months of work we put into this and the community we were able to build was under appreciated and unsupported.
It was a shame that we couldn’t get the opportunity to take the class we had worked so hard to make. Like us, a lot of people were upset and confused about why they weren’t in the speech and debate class. Senior Trent Herrmann, a debate team member, said “I’m disappointed that we are not getting a speech and debate class, and I feel sorry for the people who put a ton of effort into making it a class. I know many people were looking forward to it and I sympathize with them.”
With all of this being said, this hasn’t deterred any of us or our efforts to turn it into a class next year. We’ve learned from our past mistakes and already have a new plan of action for how we can implement it in our high school for future generations. Anthony Wu optimistically told me “see, you can place the blame on a lot of different people, but it’s not really some sort of dramatic failure: it’s a learning lesson that we have to do things a little bit differently.” I couldn’t agree more.
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