As the Bridgewater-Raritan High School Forensics Speech and Debate season begins to wind down, team members are taking time to reflect on their successes this year while focusing on the club’s future by electing new officers for the executive board.
The current executive board consists of the club’s President Andrei Cojocariu, Vice Rresident Amey Paranjpe and Secretary Advay Pandit.
On April 11, members interested in running were required to write a 200-word speech explaining why they were the best candidate. All candidates running were required to have at least one nomination from another club member or candidate explaining why they believe that person should obtain the desired position. On April 18, the voting process began, in which all members voted for who they believed would be the best fit for each of the three positions.
One of the campaign promises made by the running candidates was to bring more national circuit tournaments like Harvard, Newark, Princeton, Sunvite and Yale. The most common campaign promise was for Bridgewater-Raritan to host a home tournament, the school’s first home tournament since 2020, which would cement the school’s prominence in the New Jersey Speech and Debate League. Other promises included attracting more new members, holding more fundraisers and increasing the number of tournament placements and wins.
Riya Shenvi and Abhay Sankar ran for the presidency, in which Sankar won the election. Atharva Makode ran against Siyona Naidu for the vice presidency and won the election.
For executive secretary, Sriridhi Pothu, Suraj Shah and Sameer Tijare ran. Neither of the three won the 50% majority vote in the first round of voting, resulting in a runoff election against the top two candidates: Pothu and Tijare. On April 21, Sameer Tijare won the majority vote for secretary.
This is the first year in recent times in which all three executive board members are part of the same debate category. All three newly-elected board members do a Public Forum (PF) style of debate, with the president and vice president being partners together. This was mainly due to a higher number of new members in PF in comparison to the other categories in the school.
The next task on the agenda for the club is to elect speech and debate captains for next year, which will be announced at the club’s banquet on May 3.
