Garfield High School Debate Team

We are a two-year-old debate team from Garfield High School in central Seattle.  Policy debate is a great educational activity that allows us to grow our research, speaking and critical thinking skills.  Debate also has proven to increase the graduation rates and GPAs of students who participate, especially in low income, inner-city schools such as Garfield.

Our team has been very succesful in attracting new students.  In just two years, we have grown from eight to eighteen students.  But because our team is so new, we do not yet have a solid funding base to support us.  This is a problem because debate is an extremely expensive activity:  Individual students must pay up to $550  to cover costs such as airfare, tournament registration, and hotels, to attend just one tournament.  This is an expense that many of our debaters cannot afford. This year, a quarter of our qualified debators were not able to attend important tournaments on the national circuit for financial reasons.

We are fundraising to create a financial aid program for our team for the 2016-17 school year, so that everybody has an equal opportunity to parcipate.  Because Garfield is an inner-city school with a high proportion of low-income students, equity of access is a very important value to us.  Our goal is to ensure that all of our debaters are able to fully participate in this very meaningful and impactful activity. Thank you so much for supporting us.

*Disclaimer: All money donated to this campaign will be directed into my parent's bank account before being donated to the Garfield Debate Team.