Sadly, the deadline for GDI has passed, leaving 5 Ballard debaters the opportunity to go to debate camp this summer. Any of the Ballard ladies on the team who go to the Women's Debate Institute will receive a scholarship if we make our goal. Anything that is left over will go towards our entry fees for the Whitman High School debate tournament at the beginning of November.

It is the first major tournament of the year and our goal is to accumulate enough school Sweepstakes points to break the top 10 (out of 40-50 schools competing) in our first year. If this is not acceptable to our backers, please let us know, and we will either come up with something appropriate or be happy to refund you your backing. Thank you to everyone who has backed this project!

- on a side note, I am continuing my debate photojournalism at this summer's Gonzaga Debate Institute. http://cgrantmccool.com/debate-photography/

Thank you to all of our backers! While our pace has stalled just a little bit, we are still on pace to at least make our pledge minimum, and that is great! Your generosity is most appreciated. Please enjoy the following self-portraits. As my bio indicates, I am a photographer in addition to a debate coach and I took these photographs for my students a few weeks ago and based the character off of their lovely drawing prediction.

Again, thank you backers!

Thanks to everyone who has pledged to us so far! I've calculated it out and we need to do $20 a day, on average, to meet our actual goal of $600 and $10 a day to make it to our $300 goal. That being said, we are currently on track to make the $600 goal.

Thank you! Please look for a photo update of the students in the coming days!

For now, I'll put up the picture the students drew when they were trying to predict what "Mr. McCool" would look like.