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Amador Valley High School’s Ethics Club is one of the many extracurricular activities and organizations that has resumed business as usual since the return of in-person classes last fall.
Yet despite an uptick in interest and motivation during the pandemic that inspired some of the current members to join, it remains one of the lesser-known student-run organizations.
“A lot of clubs are created for the sole reason of college applications,” senior Sahana Kumar told the Weekly. “This is not that club. You’re not going to get that much fame or notoriety from Ethics Club, so I think that’s one reason we keep sustaining ourselves, is because we aren’t born out of necessity, we’re born out of passion.”
On the heels of a recent regional competition earlier this year, current members are seeking to raise their club’s profile, and eying ways to expand what they value about the organization locally in the future.
As participants in the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB), Amador Valley students and others throughout the country spend the school year studying cases and practicing for the organization’s annual competition, which kicks off at the regional level in January, with winners of the regional competitions heading to the national competition in North Carolina in April.
While the two teams of Amador Valley Ethics Club members who competed in the regional competition this year both failed to advance to the national level, they returned with a sense of confidence about their performance, and a desire to work towards addressing issues in the organization that they identified in the recent competition and past years.
“We were working together perfectly, everyone spoke, we spoke eloquently, we weren’t interrupting each other, we took turns, everyone was participating,” Antonio Terziysky said. “But to go against a team who, just because they’re more recognized, the judges seem to just overlook the fact that only one person is answering and that they’re not fully answering the questions.”
Although NSHEB as an organization prides itself in seeking to foster a more inclusive, collaborative atmosphere that contrasts with the competitive nature of other speech and debate competitions, Kumar and Terziysky said that this year’s event made structural inequalities within the organization clear, particularly to one of the only public school teams competing against better supported teams from private schools.
“Even though we live in a very affluent area, we’re not able to just pay a coach, and we noticed that a lot of other schools there are private schools,” Terziysky said. “I think there were only two public schools at regionals this year, and every single one of them had a coach who were either philosophy teachers or former people who have competed in college level Ethics Bowl. And then we’re just there.”
“One time someone said I was the coach, they were asking for all the coaches to meet up … I was like, ‘we don’t have a coach,’ they were like ‘oh, you are the coach now.’ So I was automatically made the coach for the records,” Kumar added. “That was bad.”
While the six-year-old club has struggled with membership and access to support from adults, Kumar and Terziysky, who are both in their senior year, and the club’s founder, who has since graduated college, are all seeking to continue working with the club, and have plans to expand access to ethics to public schools throughout the East Bay, alongside the club’s current younger members.
“We’re thinking we could do our own version of an Ethics Bowl, and it would be far more useful,” Kumar said. “It would just be for East Bay public high schools, and there would be no coaches allowed. It would just be for debate, mock trial, comp civics classes to prepare to understand better philosophy, and our club would be the judges of it, so we wouldn’t be able to compete.”
The inspiration behind this idea came in part from noticing and seeking to address inequities in NHSEB, but also looking towards the wider Bay Area with the same perspective.
“Ethics is a very privileged conversation to have,” Kumar said. “To be able to study philosophy in college is a very lucky thing to do, and I hope I’ll be able to do it.”
Kumar and the club’s other members said that while the regional competition had made it clear that they were underdogs as a public school team, it made them all the more sensitive to the difficulties of other local public schools without as many resources, which serve students who may have work, family and other obligations keeping them from extracurriculars.
“Private schools and affluent public schools like ours have that time to work on it, and we just feel like there’s this huge gap between people who need ethics the most and people who come up with ethics,” Kumar said. “We just find that incredibly irritating.”
