AC A DEMIC T E A M
Growing DEBATE PROGRAM Enters Fourth Year at Sycamore
The 2019-2020 team celebrates following one of the competitions held in early 2020.
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ycamore’s Debate Team started four years ago, in part because of what Sycamore teacher Beth Simpson saw in the aftermath of the Parkland School shootings that occurred in February 2018, where a shooter opened fire on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people. “I was watching coverage of the students as they declaimed the necessity of gun rights and was blown away by their articulation and content,” Simpson says. “I later read an article that those students were debaters.” Simpson did some research and discovered that there aren’t many middle school debate programs; it’s largely a high school activity. The one exception is a program called Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP). It was started by Kate
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Shuster Ph.D, an education researcher and author, who was the second woman to ever win the college national debate championship. “I emailed her about training, and she actually came to Indianapolis to train me and another local teacher who had also reached out to her,” Simpson says. After the training, Simpson helped Sycamore begin the Hoosier Debate League, which at the time consisted of Sycamore and Emma Donnan, an IPS charter school, where the other teacher worked.
“What I love most about this style of debating is that it combines elements from a few types of debate, like Public and
