Summer Camps

Quarry Lane offers a few different summer programs to best accommodate our students and students in the surrounding area.

Summer School Class

In 2021, Quarry Lane offered two sections (morning or afternoon) of their summer school for speech/debate. The class was for 4 hours per day, Monday through Friday, for six weeks. This represented about double the class time compared to our middle school Intro class during the school year, so we covered about 50% more material at about 2/3rd the normal pace of the Intro class. We found this best balanced rewarding kids that excelled while ensuring all kids improve.

In addition to regular breaks, we also prioritized competitive speech impromptu games at the end of each class to help unwind, reward the students for their hard work during the class, and further develop social skills.  

The class was primarily composed of middle school students. About 50% of the students were current or incoming Quarry Lane students. This represents our only educational outreach opportunity for students who are not Quarry Lane students.

NSDA HS/MS Nationals Prep Camp

In most years, NSDA Nationals offers a end of the year national tournament in June for both middle and high school students. The tournament's high school entries are limited based on qualification (and we compete in an extremely competitive district so that limits our entries who qualify to our very best). The tournament's middle school entries are open, which makes it an excellent end of year tournament to reward middle school students for a successful year. Thus, with large middle school entries, we are able to run a pre-NSDA prep camp the first week after school ends to best prepare each student for success the following week. 

Novice Policy Camp

In liu of NSDA not offering middle school debate, we lacked an mechanism to transition students who competed their first year in public forum but, following our recommendations, were going to attend a policy debate camp as their first debate camp without ever competing in policy before. As we firmly belief this practice best prepares our students, we offered a internal one week policy debate camp in June. There, students attended morning lectures about core policy concepts such as Topicality, Theory, Critiques, Counterplans, and Disads. In the afternoon, they performed drills and competed in mini-rounds to solidify the concepts learned. On Saturday, we held practice rounds so students could practice everything they learned in complete policy debates. While not replacing their lack of experience, it introduced just enough to ensure that all students attending a policy camp would be able to excel in their new environment.