Welcome to the Dulles Viking Classic, hosted at John Foster Dulles High School.

We are excited to invite you to our tournament at Fort Bend ISD's flagship campus. We are a TFA IQT, offering a full range of events, and we will be using the current NSDA topics in each debate event. The schedule and hired judge applications are available on the right. We are excited to be operating a Belonging and Inclusion Station. Eric Schwerdtfeger and Harry Yu will be the tournament's BIAs.

Policy

Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.

Lincoln-Douglas

Resolved: The United States ought to require that workers receive a living wage.

Public Forum

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially expand its surveillance infrastructure along its southern border.

World Schools

Round 1 - This House regrets the narrative that democracy is the best form of governance.

Round 2 - This House regrets the narrative that democracy is the best form of governance.

Round 3 - Impromptu

Round 4 - This House would nationalize energy companies.

Semis - Impromptu

Finals - This House would implement a living wage.

Congress

We will be using the Region 4 scaffolding plan. Legislation can be found at www.txfa.org

Prelims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Finals 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Speech

Section A: DX, NX, FX, PR, OO, POI, DI

Section B: INFO, Duet, PO, HI, Duo

Important dates

Initial Entry Deadline 9/30/24 @5pm

Drop Deadline 10/2/24 @ 5pm (entry fees are set at this time). Day of drops/no-shows will face additional penalties.

Entry limits

Events are automatically capped at 10 entries but we will add entries from the waitlist until room limit is reached.

Each school will be capped at at 4 entries initially to ensure some degree of balance.

Entries are accepted on a first come, first serve basis until our facility is full.

Drop Off and Registration

Friday 10/4 is a student/teacher holiday for FBISD this year. As such, registration will be held in the entryway to the high school on Friday. Registration for schools with only speech entries will be held in the library Saturday morning.

Hospitality and Concessions

Hospitality will be provided by our parent booster club.

Friday Dinner - Lentil Soup, Fried Rice, and Salad

Saturday Breakfast - Doughnuts and Coffee

Saturday Lunch - TBD

Our concession stand will feature your standard tournament. Additionally YoYo drinks will be serving Boba and other food items.

A plea regarding academic honesty

The TFA constitution contains multiple provisions about academic honesty in speech and debate events. Please ensure that your students are familiar with these. We will investigate and adjudicate violations of these provisions as laid out in the constitution. Unfortunately, the TFA Constitution does not have provisions regarding the use of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs). The tournament staff agrees with the NSDA that presenting arguments generated by LLMs as carded evidence is an issue of academic dishonesty. We are also skeptical of their utility as argument generation tools more broadly, believe that doing so is an academic honesty issue, and ask that students not use them to generate blocks; however, we have no recourse here, given the absence of TFA provisions. As such, we ask that you have a frank conversation with your students prior to the tournament about the academic value of their participation in speech and debate, the way in which utilizing LLMs takes away from the long term value they stand to gain from doing their own research, thinking, and writing, as well as the long term, detrimental impact that these technologies are having on the climate and our power grid.

A note on judging, judges, judge fees

We want your judges, not your money. Please solicit alumni, parents, and other members of your school community to cover the entries you put in. If you do not bring enough judges to cover your obligation, you will be paying the cost to hire them out in order to offset the expense. We will not be negotiating about this. It costs money to hire judges, and we are hosting this event as a fundraiser to support our students. There are two exceptions:

Exception 1: Those programs whose coaches are providing substantial assistance to the tournament may have their judge fees discounted. If you would like to help the tournament, you should reach out to us sooner rather than later.

Exception 2: Programs currently affiliated with an Urban Debate League may request a discount on judge fees, provided all coaches are covering judging.

Any questions can be directed to

Eric Schwerdtfeger (esdebate93@gmail.com)

Araceli Casasola (ajcdebate@gmail.com)