Junior State of America (JSA) Fall State conference

With Fall State approaching on Nov. 14 at the Santa Clara Marriott, the Junior State of America Club (JSA) is no doubt preparing for the conference full of debates, politics, and resolutions.

JSA holds three conferences per year: Fall State, Winter Congress, and Spring State.

“We’ll have several blocks of debates of different resolutions and essentially students sign up ahead of time for these debates,” explained Nikita Khurana, JSA’s Speaker of the Assembly for NorCal. “They sign up to go and watch and they have the opportunity to present subsequence speeches to show what they believe in.”

These debates on resolutions can be anything, from America’s education in “Resolved, that charter schools raise the quality of education in America” to the ideals of our country in “Resolved, that the American Dream is no longer attainable” to foreign politics in “Resolved, that the Iran nuclear deal will be detrimental to Middle East stability.”

“The key is debate,” said teacher Jeffrey Goldstein, the past advisor of the JSA club.

When they are not preparing for one of the three conferences, JSA members hold weekly meetings on Tuesdays during lunch to debate about recent resolutions and their pros and cons.

Students from JSA chapters in NorCal are also appointed to serve as mock members of the House and Senate during the Winter Congress conference.

“Winter Congress is a model, it’s a mock congress where people try to pass laws. There’s a model House, a model Senate where people try to pass laws through debate,” said Goldstein.

JSA has been around campus as early as 1994 and although not many people know about it, as junior Jala Atufa puts it, “JSA is definitely an experience and the people there are incredibly passionate through their debates.”