Funding Disparities Between Districts; How to Close the Gap

Since the mid-1900s, inequality in funding for various schools, programs, and regions all across America has largely been public knowledge, and whether progress was made to reduce the gaps or not, people almost always knew about them. I cannot say the same, however, for state circuits in Speech and Debate. Although this may come across as stating the obvious, seeing as our beloved activities aren’t exactly thrust into the spotlight very often, even among our own Speech and Debate communities, this fact is not always common knowledge, sometimes even swept under the rug. This is, in part, due to our ignorance, but also our steadfast unwillingness to help. That needs to change. 

Firstly, it is essential to analyze exactly why these funding disparities are present. It must be recognized beforehand that the NSDA does not automatically offer funding/assistance for all districts, but rather application-based grants. Individual tournaments are hosted and paid for by schools, and then the money that they would lose through hosting is made back by the number of registrations, cost of the registration fees, concessions sold, and some other factors, such as donations. This means that tournaments that are hosted that happen to receive a high attendance rate get a much larger return on investment than those with fewer attendees (for example, a tournament with two hundred attendees will make a lot more money back than a tournament with one hundred attendees). So, smaller and less established schools will often find themselves either breaking even or worse yet, losing money, while at the same time, larger schools will often find themselves generating more profit. Because of this, the large schools are more incentivized to host again, creating a virtually endless feedback loop where larger schools can get larger in monetary value, while the smaller schools suffer.

Now, as you can imagine, this also puts rural schools at quite a large disadvantage because more heavily populated areas will generally have more attendees, but that isn’t all. The amount of programs being started by schools also impacts the amount of funding in any given district. When a school wishes to start a Speech and/or Debate program, they have the option to go to the NSDA to get some money to kickstart it, meaning that schools that start a lot of programs or a district that has a lot of schools that may start one or two programs have more money circulating through it. This all leads to (and is the cause of) the large inequality in funding between districts. 

How Will This Affect the Speech and Debate Scene? 

As established beforehand, tournaments that receive fewer registrations will have a smaller amount of money to pull from to cover the costs of food, judges, awards, and more. The natural assumption to make is that these tournaments will have to cut costs in various areas, and that assumption would be perfectly correct. Last year, at my state’s National Qualifiers, I ended up being the first alternate to nationals. But as good as news that it was for me, I was completely unaware of the fact until days later, and that is purely because the district in which I compete didn’t have enough money to be able to provide awards to anybody except qualifiers, so they decided that it would be better to just not say anything about other placements. This was, in fact,  not the case with the other district in my state, as alternates to nationals (and others) were informed of their status. 

And although awards aren’t everything by any means, it can most definitely be demoralizing and frustrating to not receive even information as to how people’s hard work has paid off. This isn’t a sob story, but rather a way to attest to the effects that this funding has on so many debaters. Even though I have had my gripes, it is so much more so than just being in the dark about how someone did at a tournament. Right now, fellow debaters are being put at a massive disadvantage at the state circuit level purely because of their geological location, with less resources, lesser funded tournaments, and worst of all, fewer opportunities. However, the disparity does not have to stay this way to this extreme. We can help close the gap.

How Can This Be Done? 

Just like how every problem is eventually solved, the first step is to recognize the issue as a community. If we can make this roadblock to accessibility known, we can then rectify our long-lasting negligence. The way to properly resolve this is by pushing for change at the state level. As I previously stated, tournaments that receive more registrations naturally receive more of a monetary return, and that in essence is the root of the issue. Because of the vastly bigger return on investment for hosting tournaments in populated areas, state circuits have become far too reluctant to offer rural/low-population schools chances to host tournaments. Although my school’s Speech/Debate program is pretty successful in terms of results and would be perfectly happy to host a tournament, it has not been offered a chance in over ten years, purely because of our location, so the same cycle of larger schools hosting larger tournaments that I mentioned earlier in this article continues further. 

This is commonplace not only in my state but in every other state as well. It is for this exact same reason that we, as a community, should push for all state circuits to offer schools with a certain amount of members in either Speech or Debate a chance to host a tournament if they so choose, so every school and district has the opportunity not only to get their name out there but also to get money in the district’s pocket, leading to a reduction in the financial disparity between districts. Everyone should be able to compete with the same opportunities as another, and not be worse off purely because of what part of a state they happen to live in. That is equality, and we can make it so with just a little bit of effort on our part, as a community of connected individuals.