Cleveland Heights Teen Learns Life Lessons at the Podium

The Laurel School Speech and Debate team brought back top honors at the state competition this year, giving the school’s best performance ever, and three members we interviewed credited the same person for their success.

“If you could emphasize how important Mr. Kawolics has been,” Megan Zupon, a Solon resident and Laurel senior, appealed to Patch. “He has definitely shaped my high school career.”

“Mr. Kawolics has really taught me that I can do whatever I want to do,” said Rachel Anderson, another senior who splits her time between Cleveland Heights and Gates Mills. “I attend an all-girls school so I have this ingrained sense of feminism, but there’s still these boundaries, even within myself, and he’s really taught me that I can break through those.”

But Richard Kawolics sees things differently. “I’ve been lucky to be a really small part of their educations over the past four years.”

Kawolics started the debate team at Laurel in 2004 and in its ninth year about 50 girls — that’s twenty percent of the upper school's student body — competed.

“It’s a really close-knit community,” said Lisa Peng, a junior Lincoln Douglas debater who was named one of Northeast Ohio’s top two in her event this year.

And Kawolics commented on it, too: two of the team’s top performers in extemporaneous speaking, in which students are given 30 minutes to write and memorize a speech on a topic in domestic policy or affairs, are close off the stage, as well.

“They’re great friends,” said Kawolics. “That’s the great thing about this team, is the camaraderie. They really pick each other up.”

Four girls from the team were ranked nationally: Zupon in original oratory speech, Anderson, Peng and Caroline Veniero, who competes in extemporaneous speech with Anderson.

Anderson added that her experience on the team has helped her develop personally. “I really have developed a sense of what I think truth and justice are, because I’ve spent so much time developing my own opinions and breaking away from just repeating what my parents say or what my friends say,” she said.

Anderson, a National Merit Finalist who also writes for Laurel's student publication The GatorByte and will travel overseas on a World Hunger Prize scholarship this summer to assist in hunger research, hopes to hear from Duke and Princeton Universities soon, where she hopes to continue a similar extracurricular, especially involving domestic policy and affairs.

In all, 19 girls qualified for state and eight made it to quarterfinals.

But Kawolics made it clear that it’s not the prizes he’s after.

“Had they not won a single trophy, had they not won a single award, I would be just as pleased,” he said, “because it’s really about their personal development. It’s about them conquering challenges that they would not have been able to conquer before.”

After working in corporate strategy for 22 years, Kawolics made his way to Laurel School and immediately saw a need for a speech and debate program.

“That’s probably the most important thing that girls can come out of school with, is the ability to present themselves,” he said.

“Even though in my lifetime there have been some changes in the possibilities for women in their careers, it’s still a fact that women, on average, earn less money than men in the same professions.”

He recounted his experience with high school debates: the boys become more animated at the podium and their voices get deeper and louder, which is perceived positively.

But women’s voices tend to become higher when they become more agitated, which is perceived negatively, he said.

Peng, a Shaker Heights resident, summed up her strategy: “When I go into the debate room I try not to think about what gender the judge would prefer but rather what style he would prefer,” she said, “and that’s calm, collected and poised.”