Student debaters' topic proposal could be argued for full school year

But the topic selection process did not start at this meeting. It actually began right after last year's meeting concluded when attendees pitched topic papers to write.

"We want to make sure that when people are running this process, it looks like our students in the United States, and we want a mix of people. Otherwise, the topics become sterile and we don't need that," Weaver said."The more diversity we have in the process, the easier it is for us to say this is really a reflection of what's going on in the schools."

The NFHS established a formal mentoring program in 2021 for new and emerging authors that included Zoom meetings with veterans and plenty of opportunities for feedback on their papers to"work out any bugs" before the in-person meeting, Weaver said. At each step of the process, attendees were the models of what debate is all about—respectful, insightful and collaborative in their efforts to achieve the same goal of setting up students for success.

After the roundtables and a general meeting, the groups broke up into smaller sections, called Marshall Subcommittees, to dive deeper into the topics to craft one resolution for each of them. The resolution is the question or statement, usually in the form of a policy, that debaters argue. Kay said debaters are resourceful and will find every way to define a term—exploiting gray areas in the topic language to fit in whichever arguments they want to make.

After each Marshall Subcommittee decided on a final resolution on Friday, they were all presented to the Wording Committee, a group of debate delegates appointed by the NFHS representing each region of the country. "You know, debate people are nerds, let's face it," Kay said."These wording committees are my favorite part because it's mentally challenging. You're mentally exhausted at the end, but it's really interesting when you start considering all of this."

On Sunday, the final voting occurred among the state delegates. But that didn't preclude the other attendees from participating. After the final pitches from each author to the group, the attendees were able to caucus with their state representatives to decide their state's top five choices, submitted on a Google form.

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