MDTA Spring Meeting
Wednesday May 2, 2018
Roseville High School
Media Center
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Agenda
Annual Reports/Discussion Items
- Financial Report/Treasurer’s Report – Prax and Sylvester
- Membership Activity/Elections – McDonald
- Awards Report – Brynteson/McDonald
- Grant Activity – McDonald
- Tournament Calendar – McDonald/Brynteson
- Section/State Tournament Rules and Procedures – McDonald/Brynteson
Discussion/Action Items:
- Policy Proposals
- Background Checks for all coaches
- Background Checks for all judges (Policy Debate)
- Creation of Tournament Ombudsperson Committee
- Creation of anonymous sexual harassment and student safety reporting system
- Creation of Diversity Committee
- Tournament Procedures Proposals
- Proposal that all State Judges be required to be active judges on local circuit
- Release results of debate judge balloting including identification of school specific votes
- Creation of a Judge Voter Guide for State Judge Balloting
- Removal of any judges who haven’t judged debate in past 5 years from ballot
- Accountability benchmarks for balloting by schools (gender, race, etc)
- Novice Policy Debate Meeting and Survey Results
- Update Section/State Rules on electronic retrieval of evidence during rounds to reflect common practice of evidence sharing between teams
- Update Section/State Rules to allow the Tournament Jury to quickly change mistakes/typos in the rules manual in order to avoid problem
- Lower years out of high school to judge state debate from 4 to 2 years
- Recommendations
- Tabulation Staff – Actively seek apprentices to learn tabulation
- Create a How to Tab Manual
- Tournaments should allocate and enforce mandatory 30 minute meal time
- Provide contact information for coach who is with team at tournament to the tournament directors
- All metro policy tournaments should end by 9 PM
- Coach knowledge of school safety procedures
- Standardization of tournament experience
- Limit RFD’s to 10 minutes
- Adopt 10 minute flex prep time rule (Policy Debate)