Jordan Lee, who recently graduated from Southland College Prep Charter High School in Richton Park, took third place in two categories at this year’s National Speech and Debate Tournament.
“It’s quite an accomplishment to, first of all, get to the national tournament,” said Southland speech coach Cheryl Frazier. “Typically, those events have between 300 and 400 students in each event. So for her to come out in the top six, when they started with almost 400 students, is pretty phenomenal.”
Lee is the first student in the school’s history to make the final round in two different events at nationals. She placed third out of 396 competitors in the Poetry category, and third out of 191 competitors in the Original Spoken Word category, according to a news release from the school.
Her Poetry performance, “Ain’t Finna a Word,” addressed stereotypes and expectations around the way Black people talk.
“In my day-to-day life, I work at a country club and I worked at the DMV,” Lee said. “Being in those completely two different settings, I do code-switch a lot.”
Code-switching refers to the switch some people do between languages, dialects and styles of speech, depending on the situation. In a video of her final performance, Lee snaps fluidly in and out of African-American Vernacular English, applying different accents and inflections.
“Reading the piece, I was like, oh my gosh, I do this a lot,” Lee said. “It was kind of like an awakening for me.”
Lee’s Original Spoken Word piece was titled “The House.” Lee said she was inspired by a conversation she had with her 9-year-old sister about their parents’ separation.
“I picked that for my little sister, really, and also for my other sisters,” Lee said. “I was like, I’m the vocal one, I’m the one who has the platform, I’m the one who does do the speech, I can write and all that. Let me tell our story, not just my story.”
Lee originally qualified for the national tournament in the main category of Dramatic Interpretation, which she did not place in. Poetry and Original Spoken Word are considered supplementary events, Frazier said.
“A lot of times, their strongest events are supplementary,” Frazier said. “A lot of times we just want to get to nationals so that the child can do their supplementary event that they’ve done all school year.”
Jordan Lee poses with her trophies from the 2026 National Speech and Debate Tournament. (Southland College Prep Charter High School)
Lee said she enjoyed seeing other competitors’ interpretations of their pieces at the competition, but that she was glad to be home and able to rest after the marathon event because by the end of it she was “barely coughing up words.”
“At nationals, by day two, I had no voice at all,” Lee said. “Ms. Frazier was yelling at me the whole time to be quiet and save my voice.”
The school also sent five other students to the national tournament, which was June 14-19 in Richmond, Virginia: Gene Mambo, Aubrey Lawrence, Nylah Cox, Courtney Clemons and Aubrey Davis.
“We had four events and six students, which is more than we’ve ever had, so that’s quite an accomplishment as well. We have a very competitive qualifier tournament,” Frazier said. “We’re very proud of them.”
Frazier started the school’s speech program in 2010 when the school first opened, with just six students involved at first. Now, she said, the team is 30 to 40 students strong each year.
“Communicating is a lifelong skill,” Frazier said. “Our first objective is for them to be better communicators, not just better speakers but better listeners, to be effective communicators in any setting that they might find themselves in.”
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In particular, it’s important for students of color to learn how to tell their own stories, Frazier said. When she first started speech herself, she said, “a lot of the time, we would be the only brown students in the room.”
“I tell them, if you don’t tell your stories, somebody else will, and they will not tell it accurately,” Frazier said.
Lee joined the speech team in her sophomore year. She saw an interpretation of “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, which opened up her understanding of what speech could be, she said.
“I didn’t know that’s what they did. I literally thought it was public speaking, or you get up there and tell a speech,” Lee said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so cool.'”
She procrastinated auditioning due to stage fright, she said.
“I did my audition, cried through the entire audition,” Lee said.
Lee is headed to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall. She plans to major in philosophy, with an eye on eventually becoming a human rights attorney.
But she said that speech will certainly remain a big part of her life. A club on campus that hosts open mic nights reached out to her after seeing her Original Spoken Word performance, she said, and asked her to help host a showcase when she arrives on campus.
“I’m taking a public speaking class, so that should be fun,” Lee said. “I don’t want to get rid of acting, because I really do enjoy it so, so much.”