Here at Jackson-Milton High School we have a speech and debate team. This team can consist of any grades from 9th-12th. In the beginning of the year an announcement is made to the whole high school to go to Ms. Yantes classroom if there are interested in news paper and would like to sign up.  This year the team has the following competitors:  Brian Royea, Kent Gross, Jonathan Lanham, Rachael Lanham, Emily Donaldson, Chloe Scandy, and middle school student Aiden Cole.

There are two speech and debate individual events which are student congress and duo interpretation. There are 7 different individual categories. The students compete against 4-6 people in each round. In a regular tournament there are 3 rounds. The winner is determined by the most rounds won during the speech tournament.

A debate is 4 rounds and the teams with winning records play other winning records as the losing records play the losing records so that they can find out who is the best team after the whole debate is said and done.

Jackson-Milton competes against mostly schools in the Youngstown district. Those schools consist of Austintown, Howland, Canfield, Hubbard, etc.. Due to Jackson-Milton competing against these bigger schools, they have to really know what is going on in the debate and what the debate is about.

The team practices 20 minutes every Tuesday , Wednesday, and Thursday. They  work and practice on their own individual debate and they are only coached on their debate. These 20 minutes have to be used wisely to prepare for competition. The speech and debate team has small numbers but is also very competitive. If using your knowledge and having the confidence to debate with people about topics is something you enjoy, then maybe this is the program for you.