Jun 10, 2024 At 12:15 PM EDT
After returning from maternity leave with a few months left in the 2022 school year, Michelle Simon was looking to ease her way back into her teaching role at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School. But then she got a knock on her classroom door from a pair of students she didn't know.
"They had no idea who I was, I had no idea who they were—because I had been gone for the whole year," she told Newsweek. "They came in with the Constitution and said, 'We're looking for a sponsor.'"
The students wanted to start a debate club at school and needed a teacher to serve as the staff sponsor for the following fall semester of the then-upcoming school year.
Simon has been teaching at Hialeah-Miami Lakes for 21 years. She is the chair of the social studies department and previously served as the activities chair, the athletic director, the swimming and water polo coach and the history and geography bee coach. She said her students know she likes competition.
One of those students at Simon's door was junior Stephanie Rodriguez. After years of participating in Model U.N., mock trial and Project Citizen, she said she wanted to start a debate club because she was looking to do something different.
"I love public speaking. I know that most people are scared when public speaking, but for me, I'm happy when I speak in public," Rodriguez said.
The debate club at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School began in 2022 and included a few meetings and school events as well as one competition. The 2023-2024 school year was its first really competitive year as part of the Miami-Dade Urban Debate League.
The Miami-Dade Urban Debate League (MDUDL) is a Florida chapter of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL) that has been introducing students to debate since 2015.
For Simon, becoming part of the MDUDL this year was an easy process. She attended a Zoom meeting about joining the league at the end of the 2023 school year and dedicated one Saturday a month for tournaments.
Simon knew nothing about policy debate when she took over as the club's sponsor. But she didn't have to—she was there to simply provide a venue and resources for practice. The content, she said, the students researched themselves.
"I'm the facilitator," she said. "[The students] are the driving force behind the club."
While MDUDL is a young league in the NAUDL system, it has gone through major transitions in the last few years. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the league joined others by going virtual. The 2023-2024 school year was the first time in three years that the MDUDL was debating in person.
"I think this season was a great starting-off point—we were on Zoom for about three years and that really messed up the momentum of our league for quite a few reasons," MDUDL Program Director Kalyn Lee said.
Lee, who runs the MDUDL and coordinates programing and organizes tournaments for the league, said online debate isn't as fun for the students and makes it more difficult for students to develop key skills.
"You lose that in-person connection, you don't get the nonverbal communication, you don't get the body language, you get delays and there's so many other skill sets that are just impeded on," she said.
Online debate was not just detrimental to the debaters—the league took a significant hit as well.
MDUDL Board Chair Osvaldo Garcia said virtual debate in the pandemic was a sort of catalyst for other difficult circumstances. The funding dried up and the general sources of support were shut down, he said, which prolonged the need for virtual debate across the league.
Garcia, an attorney who currently works as an executive director at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, joined the MDUDL board in 2021 and stepped up as chair in 2022. In June 2023, he was determined to bring back in-person operations.
Even though Florida schools returned to in-person instruction by 2021, MDUDL debate remained online. In addition to the lack of funding, MDUDL was following the lead of NAUDL and other leagues in Florida that still had virtual debate for several years. The Urban Debate National Championship, NAUDL's national championship tournament, did not return to in-person debate until 2023.
"We needed to get back in person," he said. "It was really about survival at that point."
Getting back on track required rebuilding connections within the community, Garcia said. He assembled a board that is committed to the league's mission and was able to find support from donors.
"It really allowed us to place ourselves in a position where we were able to float costs of a lot of tournaments and be able to actually be back in person," he said.
Those donors were able to help the league cover the costs of transportation for teams and other tournament-related expenses, like food and insurance. When the league covers these costs, it allows the debaters, many of whom come from Title 1 schools, to compete without worrying about the financial burden.
Finding locations to host tournaments was another challenge. Buildings with private rooms are necessary to run multiple debates at once, which means schools are typically the best locations.
Garcia said the league faced hurdles with the cost of using public high schools and eventually worked with the provost at Miami-Dade College, which was "a life-saver" for the first two tournaments in the fall. The league then partnered with the University of Miami for tournaments later in the season.
In all, the league was able to host six in-person tournaments during the school year—"a win within itself," Lee said.
"We did what needed to be done this year and that was to get the kids back debating," she added.
Rodriquez and her partner Jasmine Martinez, a senior, were competing in policy debate for the first time this year. Both students have years of experience with public speaking and other forms of debate, but they walked into their first MDUDL policy debate tournament in October not knowing what to expect.
As novices, they expected to go against other teams that were new to policy debate. But they ended up debating against an experienced varsity team from South Miami Senior High School.
"We were so scared," Rodriguez said. "But I feel like going against them for our first-ever debate was one of the best things that could have happened to us. If we would have gone against a novice team, we wouldn't have learned. So from going against this varsity team, we were able to learn the [speaking] order, we were able to learn what you do in each speech, how to channel your strengths. And that really helped us for all the other rounds."
After that first tournament, the Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School team did more research into the resolution, which focused on financial redistribution in the U.S. through a jobs guarantee, expanding social security and providing a basic income; the students changed their argument and brought on some new teammates. By the third tournament, the Hialeah-Miami Lakes debate club grew from only four students to around a dozen.
Through their hard work, Rodriguez and Martinez found themselves qualifying for the Urban Debate National Championship in Evanston, Illinois, in April.
In the finals of the MDUDL national qualifier tournament, the pair were matched up against the same South Miami Senior team they lost to in their first tournament of the season. But this time, Rodriguez and Martinez came out of top, winning first place in the tournament.
"It was a full-circle moment, when in our first debate, we lost against them and then our last debate before going to nationals, we were able to win against them," Martinez said. "It's truly insane that we were able to get to nationals in our first-ever year doing policy debate. I'm very thankful."
While tournaments are the cornerstone of the league, Lee said she also wants MDUDL to provide professional growth opportunities so that students can "see success and progress in more practical areas beyond just getting a trophy."
One of those nontournament experiences included the Civic Discourse as Difficult Decisions Program (CD3), in which MDUDL debaters met Florida attorneys and argued cases in front of Judge Beth Bloom, a U.S. district judge in the Southern District of Florida who developed the CD3 event.
"It shows that our league does more than just debate," said Lee, the MDUDL program director and a former debater herself. "These are lifelong connections that you can make and this could be the difference between being able to get your foot in the door on a job interview or not, because of who you have met and who you're surrounding yourself with."
Both Rodriguez and Martinez participated in the event in April. For Martinez, this event cemented her decision to pursue a career in law.
"I got to stand up there and talk in front of this courtroom, which is very crazy to do as a senior [in high school]," she said. "To be able to be inside of a courtroom and speak as if you were to be a lawyer, it's insane and I'm very glad that I had the opportunity and I was able to speak to the practicing attorneys and listen to their points of views, and all of the different things that they went through to get to where they are."
As an educator, Michelle Simon saw the long-term impact of her students participating in an event like CD3, which opens up professional opportunities. She said the students gained exposure to professionals in a field they are passionate about pursing.Theability to share contact information and connect on LinkedIn, she said, "is a big deal for them."
"My kids come from poor families; some of them are first generation, some of them are themselves immigrants," she said. "So it's really exciting when somebody else is presenting to them and when these kids get to stand up there and shine, because intellect is intellect, regardless of the background."
By many accounts, MDUDL's first season back in person was a success. But the staff knows there is much room to grow, to address other league needs.
"For a full year of in-person debate, we were able to get the kids to increase their participation, increase our numbers, get our students to nationals—all of that, to me, is just really inspirational and it's what keeps me going because I know that it can be done," Garcia said.
Looking ahead, Garcia said the league's main goal is sustainability. Facilitating in-person debate is the bare minimum, he said.
"I want to make sure that we are moving away from this desperate cycle of constantly having to find funding, of constantly having to scramble for donations," he said. "I want to make sure that we feel comfortable year in, year out that the coaches and the teams feel secure that they're going to have a debate season every year."
Part of being sustainable is building a staff, and that starts with appointing an executive director. Currently, Lee is the only employee for the MDUDL. In addition to programming, she is responsible for all communication, meetings, managing the website and social media and professional development. An executive director would be purely focused on the administrative side of the league, leaving Lee to concentrate on building opportunities for the students.
"The more help you have, the more manpower you have, the easier it gets and the more ability [you have] to offer more assistance," Lee said.
With more staff, Lee hopes to continue to grow the league by getting more Miami-Dade public schools involved with debate and retaining the students MDUDL already has. That assistance, however, is not free. That's why the MDUDL is always looking for funding from people and organizations that "see the value in what we do every day," she added.
Lee said being a debater directly relates to the students' literacy.
"It's improving critical thinking skills, it's exposing students to material that is not just on a middle or high school grade level," she said. "And that is a direct correlation to not only test scores but their likelihood to be able to perform well in a college environment."
For Michelle Simon and her debaters, their goal is to return to nationals next year. Simon said her time in the NAUDL network has been one long learning experience for both her and her students.
"I think the kids, and myself included, have just grown through the process and the experience," she said. "In every competition, you learn something new. And every time we [compete], we walk away with something new and add it to our bag of tricks."
As the MDUDL continues to grow, Garcia hopes the spirit of debate will carry with the students throughout their lives. He said the proliferation of disagreements across all areas of society has reduced "good faith" arguments and left many people ill-equipped to tackle difficult issues in a nuanced way.
"Debate is important for us as a society and is important for us as a democracy," he said. "And it's important for these kids to be able to have the tools, the skills to be able to be successful later on in life."
