Our Mission

Fostering passion for debate through community building.

Community Building Model

Our program operates under a community building model in which we connect elementary, middle, and high school students in District 65 to foster interest in debate from early on. Students coming out of elementary schools in District 65 get a chance to meet their future opponents and teammates at the middle school level before the start of their 6th-grade year. The current middle schoolers have the opportunity of introducing their new team members to debate and learning from the Evanston Township High School (ETHS) debate team. The staff is mostly composed of ETHS students, which is the high school that most District 65 students enroll in, allowing current ETHS students to directly interact with their future debate team. The staff is also supplemented with collegiate-level debaters that will help lead the upper-level debate labs. 

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Statement on Accessibility 

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Debate is often understood as an exclusionary activity by virtue of the costs associated with supplies, coaching, and summer instruction. To directly address the issues of access and equity surrounding debate programming, our camp operates under a low enrollment fee model. To ensure that an undue burden is not placed on our campers or their family, the MMSDL Summer Debate Camp provides all supplies necessary for debating. Campers will be able to take home a full set of core files and a debate box to use for the future. We also offer financial aid to those who request it to ensure that there is no monetary inhibitor to enrollment. 

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Fostering Passion for Debate

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Early involvement in debate is crucial for students development and that of the debate programs at their schools. By encouraging early engagement in debate, we hope to build a robust pipeline of debaters to service throughout the school year. Our goal is for students to not only think critically, research, and debate from a young age, but also continue their debate careers past the middle school level. As a result, we ensure our staff includes highly trained and motivated high school debaters, some of whom in future years will likely be ex-campers. 

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COVID-19 Response

The camp will be held in person under the guidance of Northwestern University’s COVID-19 policy. There will be no online modality for the camp, unless a debater contacts us that they are unable to attend in person due to illness or an emergency. All staff will be required to test before the camp and are strongly encouraged to be fully vaccinated for their safety. If there were to be an uptick in cases that would not allow us to move forward with an in-person camp, we would move to an online format. Plans are currently being made in the case that we do indeed need to move online. 

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