Lincoln Academy senior Alexandra Welch won the state Lions Club Speak Out Championship in Auburn on April 25. She won three rounds of competition to get to the state level and win the $500 prize. Welch also won a State Debate Team contest and will go on to compete in Dallas, Texas in June, where she is the only Maine student to qualify.
This is the third year Welch has competed in the Lions Club Speak Out competition. “The first year I spoke about our prison system, recidivism, and the need for real rehabilitation. It was not a popular subject,” she said. “The second year I thought, ‘Mainers are all about the environment,’ so I chose ecology. This year I went with my heart.”
The speech that won the contest for Welch, “Remember the Ladies,” includes a quote from the famous letter from Abigail Adams to John asking him to draft laws that were “more generous and favorable” to women than his predecessors had.
She followed the women’s rights movements from the early days of Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth to the present day and called for a change of dialogue to human issues. “The biggest issue that I see is the denial of equal education, here somewhat but even more around the world,” she said. “I know I will learn a lot more in my travels.”
Welch plans to take a gap year between high school and college and has already received her deferment from The American University in Paris, one of three possibilities for her college career. She plans to travel the United Kingdom and Ireland and visit India, Thailand, and Turkey. “I want to spend some time working in an ashram, as well as reconnecting with students I met here at Lincoln in the Friends Forever exchange,” she said.
“I’ve lived in more places around Maine than I have years alive,” she said. “I’ve watched the struggles of my mother and other women and I know how hard it is to get by.”
Welch, who maintains her own home, works to support herself, and attends school full time, will need to fund the expenses herself for the Dallas competition. She is baking cakes for sale to help raise money.
Three Lincoln Academy juniors, Elise Dumont, Johanna Neesonj and Kate Laemmle, will also be traveling to compete in a different national debate competition, the Catholic Forensics League National Debates in Florida.
To help raise funds for all the girls, the L.A. debate team is making handmade Mother’s Day cards to sell.
This Friday, the Lincoln Academy debate team will stage a filibuster as a fundraiser to assist the four women with travel expenses. From Friday, May 1 at 6 p.m. to Saturday, May 2 at 6 p.m., the students will filibuster to prevent a vote on a fictional bill, dreamed up by their debate coach, Mr. Leland.
According to Welch, Sen. Evil Mustache has proposed a bill to ban all things that create happiness for puppies in order to usher in a new era of sad puppies. To thwart such an unforgivable act, the debate team must prevent the vote on the bill.
Pledges are being accepted by debate team members. For information about how to pledge and support the debate competitors, email welchaj@lincolnacademy.org. The filibuster will be held at the new Cable-Burns Applied Technology and Engineering Center and the public is welcome to attend.
Pledges may be made by the hour or in single donations, all of which will help defray the cost of the national competitions the girls hope to attend.