By Toni Garrard Clay/AISD Communications Coordinator
Each year a select group of people in the world of high school policy debate determines a topic to be used by teenagers across the land. Thanks to this process, students in all 50 states tackle a single, carefully worded topic, culminating in a national tournament. This year, there’ a 50-50 chance that essential topic will come from the mind of Athens High School educator Nicole Cornish.
As one school administrator succinctly put it, “This is a big deal.”
The decision between Cornish’s proposal — whether or not the United States should reform its immigration policy — and the competing topic — which addresses a range of poverty issues — will be made in January. Cornish’s efforts up to this point include consuming a literal stack of books and writing a 35-page research paper over the course of a year.
“I read everything I could find about the history of our immigration policy and our current immigration policy,” said Cornish. “After that, I spent a lot of time writing. Then I sent what I had written to other debate coaches to get feedback in order to start the editing and revising process.”
To understand how the dean of AISD’s Early College High School came to represent the state of Texas in policy debate topic proposals, one has to rewind to her freshman year of high school in Lindale. The high-achieving then Nicole Yeakley signed up for Debate 1 simply because it was an honors class. Her junior year she won two state titles, one in policy debate and the other in persuasive speaking. Later, while attending Baylor University, she worked as a debate coach for a nearby school. And upon graduation in 2010, she took a job at Athens High School, where she has since coached eight state champions and many more state qualifiers in speech and debate. In 2015, she was awarded her first Diamond Coach Award by the National Speech and Debate Association.
That kind of success gets people’s attention — including that of Jana Riggins, the Texas State UIL speech and debate director who also serves as a delegate to the National Federation of High Schools’ policy debate topic committee. In 2016, Riggins asked Cornish to present a topic for consideration to the committee on behalf of the Texas UIL. After the initial culling of submissions, 12 were forwarded to the committee, which was then narrowed to five, and now is down to Cornish’s and one other.
“Even if it’s not chosen, it will be worth the effort,” said Cornish. But make no mistake, the topic is one she feels passionately about.
“My takeaway from a year of study is that our immigration policy is incredibly outdated. Not counting stopgap measures, the last complete immigration policy passed by Congress was in the ’80s. In the history of our immigration policies — which dates back to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (ending the Mexican-American War in 1848) — we’ve only had three immigration policies. That’s problematic.”
So problematic, in fact, she would like to see more people become knowledgeable about it.
“As a debate community, we talk all the time about how we can spur conversations with our students that will ultimately affect some sort of change,” said Cornish. “The goal is always to get our students to become young people and ultimately adults who make informed and intelligent decisions.”