New Requirement: Tracking After-School Practices

The Chicago Debate League is now requiring that all CDL schools track and report their after-school debate practice time.

Please use the Debate Practice Attendance Tracking Form.  There is one sheet for each month.  You will need to input your debaters’ student ID, last name, and first name in the A, B, and C columns — you can cut and paste these for each month, assuming your squad has the same debaters each month.  Then in the subsequent cells for each month you will enter the number of hours that each particular debater was at debate practice for each day.  Round off to the nearest 0.5 hour.

NBA fantasy-gamer Forrest Sumlar populated a Sample Practice Attendance Tracking Form.

Each school will need to submit their populated Tracking Form on the last school day of each month — that’s October 29th for this month — to CPS Project Coordinator Na-Tae’ Thompson (jnthompson2@cps.k12.il.us).

Na-Tae’ works with Sylvia, most of you know her, if you don’t you’ll get to know her, she’s an amiable young lady (but will be very demanding of your Tracking Forms!).

We ask that you go back to populate August and September for this year — do your best to recall and make estimates for these previous dates, we won’t be overly concerned about 100% accuracy for this earlier time, but we do want to get a basic understanding of your debaters’ practice hours so far this year.

Chicago Public Schools is requiring this tracking for all after-school programs, sports included is my understanding.  But the Chicago Debate League administration views this not as a regulation from on high but rather as an opportunity.  I know it is some amount of drudgery for you (it might be something that you have a Team Captain or Team Secretary complete for you, and for you to simply review and submit — we need the form itself to come from a coach, not a student).  But what it will enable us to do is demonstrate to our supporters, in CPS and outside of CPS, how much time students are actually putting in in semi-formal educational settings.  We expect that it will help us demonstrate the intensiveness of the Chicago Debate League as an education program.

Note that the Chicago Debate League recommends three hours of after-school debate practice per week.