Travel Debate Club Team

We are adamant that our students maintain high standards of conduct at tournaments and respect their competitors and judges. You can access the full-text of our policy below and report incidents here or at this URL: https://forms.gle/c4npvCuawT9Kgv9n7

Full-text of DebateDrills bullying and harassment policy:
“DebateDrills does not tolerate harassment or bullying of any kind toward any student, staff member, or judge, whether or not they are on the DebateDrills Club Team. This includes discriminatory, prejudicial, or stereotypical comments about groups, such as women and minorities, even when the comments are not directed at an individual. We expect all staff and students to treat each other and all opponents with respect and cultivate a community of inclusion and respect, whether it’s on Slack, in person, or any other forum. Harassment or bullying can take many forms and are judged based on the effect that they have on the person experiencing the harassment or bullying.We are committed to supporting any student or staff member who has experienced or witnessed harassment or bullying.

If you have felt harassed or bullied by a student or staff member at DebateDrills and wish to report it to us, please follow the steps below. Likewise, if you have witnessed discriminatory, bullying, or discriminatory behavior or comments, we encourage you to report them to us.

DebateDrills will strictly enforce the following policy.

1. Reporting to DebateDrills
Please contact Elyssa Alfieri via Slack or email (her personal email is ealfieri1@binghamton.edu). You can describe what happened via a written message or you can schedule a phone call. We will ask you if you are okay with us talking to the person who harassed or bullied you, and if you wish to remain anonymous. We will also ask you what you would like us to do and how we can help you. We will try to respect your wishes to the utmost extent possible.

We encourage you to talk to us about behavior that makes you uncomfortable, even if you do not think it rises to the level of harassment or bullying. We are here to support you and find a solution that makes you feel safe and valued on the Club Team. That may take the form of having a Club Team -wide conversation, talking directly to an individual, or other non-disciplinary action.

2. Evaluation
Elyssa will discuss the incident with Paras and Nicolette. If you decided to remain anonymous, Elyssa will not disclose your name during that discussion to Paras and Nicolette, and Elyssa will not tell the person who harassed or bullied you. If you are okay with Elyssa disclosing your name and/or talking to the person who harassed or bullied you, we may schedule a conversation with that person.

If you are uncomfortable with this process at the time of incident, please reach out to Elyssa and we will work with you to figure out an alternative.

3. Final Decision
Elyssa will contact you once an evaluation has been made to let you know what is happening next. If you wish to remain anonymous, we will make every effort to keep you anonymous, but please remember that it may not always be possible, or the transgressor may guess that you disclosed to us.

We use a restorative discipline model to deal with students found to be harassing or bullying anyone within the DebateDrills Community or the broader Debate Community. This model underscores the importance of corrective and supportive measures to address harm; as well as the importance of the community in the process of repairing harm. The process under this model is as follows:

On the first offense:
1. A discussion occurs with the student, specifically regarding the behavior that is at issue, the harm of this behavior to the team and individuals on the team, and the exact expectations of how this behavior will change;
2. Students are required to identify ways they can make amends with students harmed, and ensure the student makes direct amends to those students if it is desired;
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On the second offense:1. The student’s parent(s) or guardian(s) are contacted, and we will collectively discuss the expectations for remaining on the team
2. Involvement in team activities (practice debates, coaching sessions, tournament attendance) is suspended, with the requirement that the student reflect on the following: the event in question, the student’s thought process at the time of the event, the student’s thought process since the event, the harm caused by the student’s behavior, and the steps required to repair the harm caused
3. The student takes actionable steps to repair the harm caused with the individuals involved and the individuals harmed are consulted in the process of the student returning to team activities

On the third offense:
1. Expulsion from the team, with a transparent discussion with the team on our decision


4. Appeals
Once someone has been removed from DebateDrills because of harassment or bullying, they will not be permitted to return for any reason. In the exceptional case that there has been an error or there is new information available, they may appeal directly to Paras via email or text. Appeals are discretionary.”‍

All DebateDrills students will open-source disclose constructive positions and provide round reports ASAP after debates. Students may occasionally forget due to post-round logistics and human error (e.g. short turnaround time for next debate, flight to catch). If this happens, please let Lucas (lucas@debatedrills.com) know and we will fix that ASAP.

Pre-round, we will disclose the affirmative 30 minutes before the debate and ask our colleagues to do the same. If it is a new aff (meaning it has not been read by anyone on DebateDrills), we will say “new aff” and will not disclose any portion of the affirmative.

When tournaments have an entourage rule, we will ensure all DebateDrills coaches are registered as an entourage for our top debater(s). When tournaments do not have an entourage rule, we will input our judges for 1 round obligations for our top students to increase the judging pool quality. Our students are required to avoid using their parents or other lay judges to fulfill judging requirements barring exceptional circumstances.

As part of our commitment to transparency, we will err on the side of caution to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. The rest of this document contains the official DebateDrills MJP and conflict guidelines we require students to abide by at any given tournament. It also contains a roster of students on our team. While we will strive to check every single conflict to ensure that we are constantly leading the charge in best practices, it is possible we will occasionally make mistakes. If you have any concerns about who is judging our students at any time, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Official Policy

“I think the real test should be this and the question is a simple one. Did you or persons with whom work closely have a direct and/or regular influence on or presence with the preparation, development, articulation, and presentation of arguments for this competitor for this tournament or tournaments within this competitive season… that they may use for this tournament? If the answer to that question is "yes," then you need to conflict yourself from judging those competitors. If you did not do those things, then there should be no conflict.”

-Dave Houston, April 22nd, 2018
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In the spirit of this email sent before the 2018 Tournament of Champions:

1. Every DebateDrills student will be required to conflict an independent coach any DebateDrills teammate brings to any given tournament. By way of example, if Student A has Person X coaching them privately in addition to the DebateDrills Coaching Staff, every other student at the tournament must conflict Person X at said tournament. For further clarity, if DebateDrills Club Team Member Rex Evans (Santa Monica RE ’19) hires coach Cameron Baghai privately in addition to the DebateDrills Club Team Coaching staff, and, Rex decides to bring Cameron to Tournament Y, all other DebateDrills students at Tournament Y must conflict Cameron Baghai, regardless of any previous affiliation with Cameron.

2. If any DebateDrills student hires a judge at any given tournament solely to fulfill the tournament’s judging obligation requirement, other students attending said tournament may not conflict said judge given that the judge isn’t coaching the student in question. By way of example, if DebateDrills Club Team StudentTej Gedela (Enloe TG ’19) hires Tara Norris to fulfill a judging obligation at Tournament Z, no other DebateDrills student attending Tournament Z may conflict Tara Norris.

3. All previous DebateDrills Club Team Coaches will be conflicted from judging DebateDrills students’ until they no longer have a relationship to any student on this year’s roster. By way of example, if Paras Kumar worked on the Club Team from 2016-2018, Paras may only judge students affiliated with DebateDrills after there are no students on DebateDrills’ current roster from Paras’ tenure with DebateDrills.

4. All previous DebateDrills students who graduate from our Club Team and then judge on the national circuit will be conflicted from judging DebateDrills’ students until either a) 4 years have elapsed or b) they no longer shared preparation with any current members on the team. By way of example, San Marino ED (Eric Deng) was on our Club Team for 1 season (2017-2018). He will be conflicted from judging our students until either a) the 2022 season or b) he no longer shared preparation and materials with any of the students on the current DebateDrills Roster.

We are pro open-source disclosure. You are no longer part of a “small school” (if that distinction even makes sense, which we personally think doesn’t). By being part of our Club Team, you are amongst the most prepared debaters at every tournament you attend. We require every student to follow the protocol below for disclosure – we promise you that you will not lose rounds because of this. We know that this is a major departure for some of you from how you debated in the past, but please trust us on this. The “disclosure hurts your ability to win” argument is silly and empirically disproven over and over again by our collective team success. If you have concerns about disclosure or think it’s bad, please talk to us ASAP. We will spot check your disclosure pages throughout the season to ensure you are abiding by our team rules.

General Overview:
• If you are a novice, please message your head coach and they will help you get set up with a wiki page on the NDCA wiki.
• We should all be disclosing on the wiki properly. If anyone has a problem with this, we are happy to explain to you why disclosure is a good practice.
• We should be disclosing in good faith - this means we aren’t engaging in any shenanigans involving disclosing all analytic cases, disclosing on the Public Forum wiki, disclosing incorrect arguments, or anything ridiculous of the sort. Disclose and disclose properly.
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What follows may be a departure from what you have previously done. Please follow the guidelines below. They may create some more work for you in the short term but will yield long term benefits and establish good norms for the whole community.
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Cites:
• We will post cites for a position including tags for every new position that we break (i.e. new aff, DA, K, etc) and the first three and last three words of the card text.
• We should NOT be disclosing pre-written analytics. You only need to disclose a quick summary (3-5 words) of what each analytic argument says.
• You don’t need to create a new cite entry for every round you read a position - just one for the first round you break something.
• Cite entries should be clearly and appropriately labeled with the topic and quick 1-2 word label for the position
• e.g. “SEPTOCT - Kant Aff”
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Round Reports:
• Must be posted for every round
• Information that should be included:
1. Tournament and round
2. Opponent
3. Judge
4. Round break down (what the 1ac was, what was in the 1nc, what the 2nr went for, any new 1ar arguments, and what the 2ar went for)

Open Source:
• Should create a doc with all the cards that you read in the round
• Cards should be sectioned off by speech
• All 1ac cards should be under a separate header labelled “1ac” and all 1ar card should be under a separate header labelled “1ar”

Disclosing Participation in DebateDrills
In years past, we have had coaches request that we ask our students to disclose they are part of DebateDrills. We agree with the reasoning of our colleagues - being part of a prep-sharing network like ours puts you at a significant advantage, and the rest of the national circuit should have the right to know who is working with whom. Accordingly, we will require all students to have the top entry on their aff and neg wiki indicate that they are a member of the DebateDrills team. The entry should go as follows.

1. Title: 0 - DebateDrills
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2. Tournament, Round, Judge:
Tournament: All | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All
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3. Cite box:
I'm on DebateDrills! Here's a link to:
- List of Members and Coaches:
- Relevant Team Policies:
- Harassment/Bullying Complaint Form:

https://forms.gle/c4npvCuawT9Kgv9n7
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4. Open Source: Not Applicable for this entry.

If you have any questions about this or need some help to get started, please get in touch with us. You will be in direct violation of our Service Agreement if you do not abide by the policies above, so please make sure you are crystal clear on how this all works before the season begins.

Navigation Function
Please put, under identifier 0, the following 3 things each as their own wiki entry:
• Contact Information
• Disclosure of participation in DebateDrills (see above)
• Navigation Toolkit

Please check the software stack and Tej Gedela's wiki from a past season to see what best practice looks like.

Part of good disclosure practices is not only disclosing post-round, but also following best-practice pre-round. We have put a lot of time and thought into these pre-round policies, so if you have questions or concerns, let us know. And again, if you are just getting started with debate, don’t worry, this will all make sense soon.

[AFF] If not breaking new:
• Disclose 30 mins before the start of round. If flight B, disclose 30 min before the start of flight B
• Disclose which aff and point to relevant entry on the wiki with proper plan text, advantages, etc
• Important Note: If someone else on the team has read the affirmative before, that means the affirmative is no longer new. When asked what the aff will be, refer them to your teammate’s wiki

[AFF] If breaking new:
• Disclose that it is a new aff 30 mins before start of round. If flight B, disclose 30 min before start of flight B
• We strongly recommend that you do not tell them plan text or advantages, though we will ultimately leave that to your discretion. If your opponent wants to make it a procedural debate, we will teach you to engage and respond substantively to their concerns

[NEG]
• After being told what the aff is, disclose past 2nr’s as soon as possible and point to any relevant cite entries
• Ask for aff disclosure as soon as possible but you should get disclosure at minimum 30 mins before the start of round
• Do not disclose what the 1nc will contain. If your opponent wants to make it a procedural debate, we will teach you to engage and respond substantively to their concerns

We have no tolerance for any type of cheating in debate rounds, including, but not limited to: clipping, communicating on Slack with teammates or coaches during debates, stealing prep time. Consequences are as follows for cheating:

DebateDrills requires families to make a good-faith effort to find qualified judges to fulfill their individual judging obligation for all TOC Bid Tournaments.

While we understand it is an additional cost to hire qualified judging for every tournament, it is essential that we operate in good-faith and make meaningful efforts to provide judges we would want to debate in front of. The community relies on qualified judging. Parents do not count as qualified judges - just as we do not want to have important debates in front of the parents of our competitors, they do not want to debate in front of the parents of our students.

The question you should ask yourself is this: would you feel comfortable staking an important debate round in front of the judge you have provided for this tournament? If the answer is no and you did not make a good faith effort to source qualified judging, you are in direct violation of our Qualified Judging policy with the following consequences: