SPARTA’S MISSION

Sparta Debate was created in response to the growing number of inaccessible, paid K-12 speech and debate programs that continue to foster inequalities within education. This program was founded to close the gap in academic debate between the rich and poor, and to provide equal opportunities for intersectionally marginalized students in the Central Valley to grow their academic and professional skills.

Sparta Debate was founded in March of 2026 by sisters Daniela and Veronica Romo-Vargas. Daniela is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she double majors in Political Science and Chicano Studies with a minor in Public Policy. She recently graduated from San Joaquin Delta College, where she earned four associates degrees and a paralegal certificate while competing on SJDC’s speech and debate team for two years, emerging as the most decorated competitor in the program’s history. Veronica is a middle school student in California’s Central Valley, where she participates in school clubs and leadership while caring for her family back home. As sisters from a family of migrant farmworkers, they created this organization to increase academic resources in the Central Valley and provide a safe space to center conversations of identity and intersectionality in academic debate. 

Sparta Debate operates on the philosophy that marginalized youth are capable of becoming today’s leaders when granted admission to historically inaccessible educational programs. We approach education as a tool for equalization and a mechanism for combatting the long-standing harms of global racism, xenophobia, classism, and income inequality. We believe in the empowerment of working-class youth and other historically marginalized groups through a free, community centered, and problem-posing educational approach. Students are taught to be leaders in their communities and to think critically about real-world solutions to problems they experience first-hand. Through an ethnic studies-based debate curriculum that employs Ignatian pedagogy to raise critical consciousness, Sparta Debate teaches marginalized students to understand power dynamics and become agents of change. Fundamentally, we believe in students. We believe in their right to an education without price tags.