On Jan. 9, two Mount Si High School debate team students qualified for the Tournament of Champions, a national high school debate tournament held at the University of Kentucky in April.

This makes 2016 the fourth consecutive year students from Mount Si have qualified for the tournament.

Participating at the 82nd annual University of Puget Sound Forensics Tournament on Jan. 9, 22 Mount Si High School students were divided up into 11 teams to take part in the open, junior, and novice categories of the public forum debate.

Mount Si’s Raury Thompson and Dana Korssjoen won the Open Public Forum category which earned them a spot at this year’s Tournament of Champions. According to Speech and Debate coach Chelsea King, Mount Si High School is still the only school in Washington to qualify for the tournament.

Overall the Mount Si debate team earned 16 awards including Thompson and Korssjoen’s first-place finish. Kiera Mix and Sophia Ojeda earned first and second speaker in the Novice Public Forum respectively, Lauren Zinkan and Kenzington Dupree were quarter-finalists in the Open Public Forum, Katie Navidi and Megan Luke made it to semi-finals in the Junior Public Forum, Reagan Thompson and Liam Renner made it to quarter-finals in the Junior Public Forum, Sophia Ojeda, Kiera Mix, Sydney Prins and Caitlin Hearn were all semi-finalists in the Novice Public Forum, and Abbas Jaffery and Chriag Vedullapalli were octo-finalists in the Novice Public Forum.