The weekend of March 2-3, members of the Woodland Park High
School forensics team competed at the National Qualifying
Tournament in Congress in Grand Junction. The Congress event
required participants to research, write and argue for the passage
of several legislative bills in a mock senate or house of
representatives setting.
The Woodland Park High School Congress team – Chris Cheaqui,
Chris McDonald, Brandon Parent, Tom Schad, Matt Koc, Allyson Myers
and David Daley – has developed 15 bills for the tournament,
including the mandatory vaccination of teenaged girls for the human
papillomavirus; a fuel tax to lower U.S. consumption and aid in the
war on terror; and limiting time convicted individuals can spend on
death row before execution to five years.
“In researching this issue, I came to see it as a classic
struggle between personal freedom and government intervention – or
‘nannyism’ as I call it,” said Cheaqui, who argued against the HPV
bill in a practice on March 1.
“It was really interesting, after we had developed our bill, the
Texas governor actually mandated a very similar measure in that
state,” Parent said.
On another forensic front, 18 Woodland Park team members
qualified from the regional tournament for the state tournament
March 16-17 in Fort Collins. State qualifiers and their events are
Heather Carey-interpretation of poetry; Tom Schad and James Miller,
interpretation of humor; Kinsey Hess-Rizzolo, John Slaughter,
Mariah Pogue and Skylar Sprague, duo interpretation; Chris Cheaqui,
foreign extemporaneous speaking; Brandon Parent and Chris McDonald,
U.S. extemporaneous speaking; Matt Koc, David Daley and Ayla
Larsen, interpretation of drama. Allyson Myers, Tim Woods, Tom
Grounds, Brennan Kita, and Amy Bingen also will attend the state
tournament as alternates.
On March 23-24, forensics team members will compete at the
national qualifying tournament for speech and debate at Pine Creek
High School in Colorado Springs.