Last year, at the national qualifier which has been hosted at Stuyvesant for over 20 years, Stuy's Speech & Debate team attended its last live event. Since that day last March, everything has been virtual.
Last week, online, our teams, (Speech, Debate and Congress) competed virtually for the right to represent our school and our league at the National tournament, which is being held in virtual Minneapolis. We qualified a record number of students including:
4 Public Forum teams
3 Congressional debaters
3 Policy Debate teams
a LD debater
2 Orators
a sophomore in Declamation
2 Oral Interpretive students
and 3 Duo teams.
Our Parliamentary team, which travels a different circuit, has just been ranked #1 in NY state and 7th in the nation. They have done an amazing job competing virtually all over the country—last week they were at Berkeley!
Veteran coach, Ms. Julie Sheinman shares, " I know some of these terms may be unfamiliar to you. And I am not sharing this with you to brag about the success of our team. I am proud of them, of course. If you could see them assembled on line at 8:00am warming up, feeling excited about the day, supporting each other with coaches, parents and alums on board to help, you would have seen a very affirming and heart-warming scene. Our kids are resilient, and they did something they love under the most difficult circumstances. They have worked together to keep going all year.
This has been such a difficult year. I wanted to share with you what a great day yesterday was for Stuyvesant."
