Apr 28, 2023 At 12:33 PM EDT
Rolland Janairo has no personal background in debate, but with decades of experience working in education, he is focused on advancing the sport as the executive director of the Silicon Valley Urban Debate League (SVUDL).
The SVUDL was founded in 2014, in the nation's innovation and technology hub, with the goal of filling the "startling gap in opportunities in the high-poverty schools of San Jose and the Peninsula," according to the league's website.
After launching two pilot programs in August 2014, the league slowly began to grow. It now serves over 500 students in 13 schools, including Yerba Buena High School, which sent two teams to the Urban Debate National Championship Tournament in Dallas that ran from March 31 to April 2.
"Silicon Valley, as you can imagine, has very much the reputation of being just this geographic sector of wealth and opportunity, which it is for quite a few people," Janairo, 43, told Newsweek recently. "But there are thousands of kids and, relatedly, their families who don't necessarily have access to that wealth."
The goal of the league, he said, is to "level the playing field."
"[We] have to break that mold and break that barrier [to] the perception that there are tons of kids that need our support and need our help," he said. "And we want to...ensure that they have the same opportunities that their peers have from better resourced communities."
Janairo, the child of Filipino immigrants, was born and raised in New York City. He attended Brown University before receiving his master's degree in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
He has previously worked as a preschool teacher and was the associate director of teacher development at the national early education organization Jumpstart for Young Children, as well as the director of playmaker operations at the Life is Good Playmaker Project, which provides training, tools and coaching to support early childhood professionals. He also served as the chief operating officer at education nonprofit World Savvy before joining SVUDL in 2018.
While he did not have access to debate in high school himself, Janairo was drawn to the Urban Debate mission and its educational benefits.
"I've been working in education nonprofits for more than 20 years now and fell in love with the mission of SVUDL, particularly as it pertains to just building these amazing skills that kids need to be successful in higher education and in the workforce beyond," he said. Those skills include critical thinking, collaboration, research, public speaking and argumentation.
With debate, students are not just memorizing and regurgitating facts, they are critically engaging with nuanced topics in current events, including artificial intelligence, immigration and climate change.
"Their willingness to engage with these topics is inspiring, and it gives me hope for the future, quite honestly," he added. "It's less about necessarily winning rounds, but about building those skills."
Janairo is primarily responsible for the strategic direction of the league, which just launched its new three-year plan in January. As part of that initiative, the league is concentrating its resources on building after-school debate programs and integrating debate into regular classroom curricula.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced the league to reevaluate its approach. Before COVID, SVUDL sent full-time staffers to coach debate, a model Janairo said was not sustainable for large-scale growth.
He said the league faced an existential question: "If we don't adapt now and prove to the education ecosystem that we deserve to be a part of it and are valuable contributors to it, we're done."
So the league shifted its strategy to recruit teachers to be the debate coaches in their schools. It also got state approval to implement speech and debate-centered curricula, allowing teachers to incorporate the principles and skills of debate into their regular classroom instruction to continue to grow participation.
"That was a game changer for us,"Janairo said. "We started serving more kids, the teachers were doing the teaching, and so we didn't have to be there every day."
The expansion of these programs depends on funding, another one of Janairo's jobs at SVUDL.
"I'm trying to secure the resources so that our staff is supported and that we have all the money and resources we need to get these kids to tournaments and start building our teacher-coaches and making sure that they're empowered to do what they're doing," he said.
SVUDL serves schools with at least 60 percent of students from low-income backgrounds and works with school administrators and staff to provide resources for these programs, helping eliminate the cost to student debaters and teachers. This includes giving teacher-coaches a stipend and covering the cost of travel to tournaments for students.
Part of Janairo's job includes coordinating with outside partners, including local college students who volunteer as judges at tournaments and professionals who host workshops and field trips.
"Those types of relationships are critical for us," he said, adding that these events give the league the opportunity to elevate itself within the debate community.
Even though they compete against each other in tournaments, the California Urban Debate leagues found a way to work together to advocate for their mission.
The Silicon Valley, Bay Area, Sacramento and Los Angeles leagues formed a nonprofit called the California Association for Urban Debate Leagues in 2021 to lobby the state for more funding and organize efforts from a fundraising perspective.
In his time at SVUDL, Janairo has seen the impact that debate instruction has on community activism.
During the 2020 election year, a group of students led by the debate team at East Palo Alto Academy wanted to have a say in the membership of the local school board that was making decisions affecting them, even though they still weren't old enough to vote.
"They're like, wait a second, we can't vote yet. But what they do on a day-to-day basis is really important," he said. "They decided to hold a candidate forum for those school board members, and they were the ones who asked all the questions, so that they can go back to all the people that they knew and their families and their communities who could vote."
Janairo said the league will continue to inspire students to engage with their communities to be champions of democracy, regardless of age.
"They have valuable perspectives and opinions that should be expressed, that should be heard and that should be magnified," he said. "They know how to make those arguments and advocate for certain points in their communities."
Going forward, Janairo is focused on increasing the accessibility of debate for all students in Silicon Valley, even if they choose not to debate competitively.
"We have proven time and time again," he said, "that when they get to the table, they deserve to be there and they will succeed."
