We are the Robert McQueen High School Speech and Debate Team. We participate in competitive speaking, and we're pretty good at it. This year, we have qualified the Policy Debate team of Madeline Reese and Sean Michael Cronan for the National Debate tournament held in Dallas Texas June 14-20 of 2015! As you can imagine, budgets are tight for extracurricular activities (although our administration has always supported us in spirit and we love them). Right now we have no way to pay to attend the tournament or send our debaters to camps during the summer to have all of our hard work pay off. We work night and day all year long, putting countless hours into research, practice, and competition in preparation to qualify for this prestigious tournament.

Madeline and Sean’s story is rather unique – Madeline is in 9th Grade and Sean in 12th – what makes them unique is that both have only been participating in competitive Speech and Debate for 7 months! Sean also qualified for the National Tournament in Student Congress and International Extemporaneous Speaking – through his hard work he achieved the rarest “tri-fecta” in the speech world. Sean and Madeline started the year off by going 1-3 at their first tournament. As the season progressed we believed something special would happen. In the past month they competed at Berkeley getting to the quarterfinals of the largest High School Tournament in the country and also winning the Spring Creek Tournament just 4 weeks ago. These are only a few examples of the incredible talent of our debate team members. The soft skills that students are learning each time they debate are skills that are going to be in valuable to them in whatever career path they choose. They are learning to be better students, better speakers, better scholars, and better global citizens.

Supporting our program with this project will only expand on the program's ability to prepare the next generation of societal and political leaders. It's an opportunity for each of the students to showcase their talents as well as represent with pride McQueen High School on a national level. We would greatly appreciate your support!

Our Budget for the team includes costs related to two primary areas: Nationals and summer Debate Camps. For Nationals we anticipate it will costs $7,500. This is broken down as follows:

$1,800 airfare
$2,600 hotels
$1,500 food
$600 rental car
$1,000 entry fees and miscellaneous

Any money raised above our goal or below (if we do not reach the goal) will be used for travel costs, preparation materials, and debate camps.