Santa Rosa Junior College’s Speech and Debate Team will host its Spring Speech Night fundraiser at 6 p.m. on April 5 at Burbank Auditorium. Tickets cost $5, and the Speech and Debate Team will showcase many of its award-winning speakers and events ranging from speeches-to-entertain to dramatic interpretations.

Spring Speech Night will consist of debate and individual events; the speakers will be Speech and Debate students who are going to the Phi Ro Pi National Tournament. The proceeds from the event will go to help send the SRJC’s Speech and Debate Team to nationals in mid-April in New Haven, Connecticut.

Marina Whitchurch, an SRJC speech teacher who coaches the speakers on their individual events, said the event is a good introduction to speech for everyone, whether they are taking a speech class or not. “It will have entertainment value, current and social relevance and it will be interesting,” Whitchurch said.

The Speech and Debate Team is currently preparing for its state tournament in Los Angeles March 17-20. Following the state tournament, the team will return to Santa Rosa to speak at Spring Speech Night.

Koji Takahashi, 19, one of the Spring Speech Night speakers, has been involved in public speaking since he took Speech 1A in Fall 2009 and decided to join the Speech and Debate Team. Takahashi has been with the team for three semesters and has helped the team win almost 20 awards thus far.

Debate team member Brenda Nelson, 18, is one of the founding members of Windsor High School’s Debate Team, and is working as a Speech and Debate coach at Sonoma Academy. “It’s fun!” said Nelson. “A lot of the individual events are really great, especially the Speech-to-Entertain and After Dinner Speeches.”

The Speech and Debate Team worked on the speeches to be performed at Spring Speech Night and tested them on audiences throughout California over the course of the school year.  Takahashi said, “We really want to show everyone our most captivating, moving, comical and intellectual events. These events have been specifically constructed to capture an audience.”

Takahashi thinks that anyone who attends Spring Speech Night will find something rewarding. Takahashi has received comments from many people who were pleasantly surprised by how entertaining the previous Speech Night was, and he is confident that the audience for the 2011 Spring Speech Night will feel the same way.