Student abuse

I put this out today on the NDCA listserv and Facebook page.

I feel a need to publish an update on what I brought up here a few weeks ago about the need to address personal abuses of students in high school debate.

There was a lot of discussion in the open forums, mostly supportive, much of which I took in to help guide wherever this was going. My original proposal ended in suggesting regular use of an ombudsman approach, and I have been working on documentation ever since I brought this up.

The discussion has not ended—far from it—but it has moved over to a less public area with a handful of coaches. We’re not trying to be secretive, just manageable, although the privacy of the discussion does allow us to speak more freely than we might in a totally open forum. I’m reluctant to comment too much on these discussions at this point, as we’re still in the middle of things. My goal, of course, was to address problems that I had encountered, problems I knew that others had encountered as well. As it turns out, this opened the door to still more problems, and more problems after that… Needless to say, I don’t think we can solve every problem that arises. But we can face every problem that arises and do our best to deal with it.

No proposal will be worth much if it isn’t given enough solid support to make it happen, and that’s where we are now, trying to work out something that people will agree has a chance of making a difference, something positive that will not generate its own new problems. Something will come of this, and I hope it’s something good.

I will report progress as soon as I can. I would like to go into the 2014 season with solutions in place.