Among virtual classes and other school related activities, this year’s annual speech festival took place through WebEx. More than 800 Moanalua High School students participated along with students from 26 other schools. It proved to be a community effort, with about 80 volunteers to help judge the various languages and levels. 

This shows how valuable community is in times like these. But some schools were still hesitant to participate due to the ordeals that came with the virtual switch.

“With the WEbEx capacity limit, we could not have all of the level I students participate, so each class period selected five representatives to present before the judges.”, World Language teacher and festival coordinator Jamie Lyn Tateyama said.

Japanese 2 student, Cole Tanaka says, “Overall I understand that Covid affected the speech festival and I can’t say it was the worst thing but it was just not as good because i did not get to present in front of judges like we did in previous years”. 

Still yet, teachers and students once again persevered through the challenges of this unusual year together.

World Language Learning Center President, Tiana Carmickle says, “I think the main difference between previous years is the interaction between students. I felt the online speech festival was less exciting, lacked peer support, and had low energy due to the distance caused by virtual learning as opposed to previous years”

In spite of the limitations they were faced with, Maraiah Valendia, a Spanish 1 student, says she still prepared by “studying for it through quarter three because her Spanish teacher helped us (class) with writing drafts and what we wanted to talk about.”

Carmickle also says, “Despite having to be online for this year’s speech festival, we all worked as a team and created the best event possible. If it wasn’t for the staff and students working together it would not have been a success.”

Mrs. Tateyama was overall “really happy that we had outside schools participate and that they (language students) felt it was worth all the practice”  and would like to thank the state’s people who helped in designing this year’s speech festival.