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Springfield may soon vie for not one but three NFL
teams. Frank Ross, a Springfield resident who once competed
in the NFL and is helping lead the capital city’s campaign,
doesn’t find the idea so far-fetched. On Jan. 22, local officials plan to meet with
representatives of the NFL — the National Forensic League, a national
high-school speech-and-debate honor society. Students who participate and excel in competitive
forensics, or debate, will have more choices in life than those who stand
out in athletics, Ross says. “Verbal-communication skills are
everything,” he says. “We do a disservice to our young people
if we’re not challenging them. Our democracy depends on people who
are educated.”
NFL participants prepare themselves to debate in
either the affirmative or negative on a particular topic in several events,
including expository and impromptu speaking, dramatic and humorous
interpretation, international and U.S. extemporaneous speaking, and
legislative, policy, and Lincoln-Douglas debate. For example, the
January-February topic in Lincoln-Douglas debate is “Resolved: It is
just for the United States to use military force to prevent the acquisition
of nuclear weapons by nations that pose a military threat.”
During an October meeting of the District 186 school
board, Ross presented a video of an episode of 60 Minutes highlighting the success
of an inner-city Baltimore high school’s debate program. He believes
that the introduction of competitive debate could have a similar impact in
Springfield’s public schools, where 51 percent of 11th-graders met or
exceeded standards in reading on the 2007 Prairie State Achievement
Examination. District 186 spokeswoman Sarah Watson says that the
district’s superintendent, Dr. Walter Milton Jr., favors exploring
the possibility of introducing debate to the district’s three high
schools. She says that members of Milton’s staff are looking into
such issues as gauging student interest and determining how much money the
district would be able to set aside for debate (each school pays a $99
membership fee to participate in the NFL, and there is a one-time fee of
$15 per student). Ross, who says he was partly inspired by the story of
Wiley College — a small all-black school in Texas whose debate team
went undefeated for almost a decade in the 1930s, portrayed in the recent
film The Great Debaters — believes that the district can recoup costs and maybe
even make a profit by soliciting businesses to sponsor debate tournaments
in Springfield. Besides, he adds: “How much do 3-by-5 index
cards cost?”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2008.
