Essential Clean-Up and Maintenance of Tournament Host Sites

At the joint Local Circuit Conference and “A” Conference Tournament Four, hosted by Schurz H.S., we had a serious problem with the condition of classrooms at the end of the event. Rooms were left with desk-chairs disordered, garbage strewn on the floors, teachers’ desks disheveled, some materials in rooms in disarray, white boards with graffiti on them.

These problems were compounded by the CDC’s failure to lead a thorough clean-up effort at the end of the event. So on Monday morning, the Schurz administration had to field a large number of complaints from teachers about the condition of their classrooms. We will correct our procedure going forward, but we do need the cooperation and assistance of all coaches and judges if we as a league are to properly treat the facilities that our generous tournament host sites offer for our collective use.

David will soon be posting details, but we will need a more vigilant effort on the part of coaches to instruct their students to be respectful of the building in which they are guests, and to clean up after their students when they fail to clean up after themselves. We will need all judges to ensure that the classroom in which they judge the last prelim round of the day (generally that’s Round II on Friday and Round V on Saturday) is restored to orderliness, without any trash on the floor, before the debaters in the room are allowed to leave it. And we will need to enlist the help of volunteers to go from room to room helping us clean up toward the end of the event on Saturday.

We all must take the essential clean-up and maintenance of our tournament host sites seriously, or we’ll be left without any schools willing to host us because we cannot be counted on to be respectful of their facilities and to be responsible guests.

Also, and unrelatedly, we received an objection from a school administration that coaches/judges were smoking on school property. All of the schools at which we hold tournaments are smoke-free — smoking cannot be done on school grounds.

And finally, we had a minor security incident with two observers from a competing school at Solorio Academy. We generally discourage schools from bringing student-observers to CDL tournaments. Rather than observing, students should be entered to compete to try it out and learn about debate that way.