Middle School Topics and Evidence

The Middle School Lincoln-Douglas (LD) Topics:

  • 1st Semester LD Topic 
    Resolved: Justice requires open borders for human migration. 
     
    2nd Semester LD Topic (Jan-May, State Tournament)
    Resolved: The United States ought to implement a single-payer universal healthcare system.
Rationale: Middle School LD – You may notice that these are topics that the high school has used before, so we anticipate many useful resources. The expected model moving forward is to always choose two topics from the prior high school season. 

MS Policy Debate Topic 

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income.
 
Rationale: Middle School CX – The topic always aligns with the official high school topic but in a more limited and focused way. For those of you familiar with the high school novice list, this topic reflects some of those affirmative areas, but they’re modified to give teams more flexibility on plans and advantage areas.
 
 The Elementary PF Topic for 2023-2024 will be:
 
Resolved: On balance, the benefits of social media outweigh the harms
 

Rationale: Elementary PF – An objective of our organization is to foster debate that is educational, fair, and mindful of the needs of Utah. We select topics to harmonize, standardize, and support consistent debate across the state. The primary goal of the Elementary topic is to build and generate interest in debate for young students while connecting to other curricular topics they may be learning about. We’ve also found it helpful to choose topic areas from previous PF topics so that we have access to useful teaching resources. With that in mind, we proposed two topics that are locally relevant, scientifically grounded, and relatively accessible.