RE LOG Spring '25

36 Ransom Everglades LOG SPRING 2025 On Campus By Amy Shipley It was 9:14 p.m. on April 11, 2024, when Kate Hamm heard squealing tires, then a crunch, as she walked across Main Highway near the former Lulu’s restaurant. The next thing the Ransom Everglades speech and debate coach knew, she was on her back, staring up at the grill of a Suburban. “My entire body felt just one giant stab of pain,” Hamm recalled. She would later learn the impact from the SUV caused her torso to shatter like a windshield; she was left with more than 20 fractures across her pelvis: a broken right sacrum, cracks in her pubic bone and multiple fractures of her acetabulum. She also had a broken fibula and a torn medial collateral ligament. In shock and shaking uncontrollably, she was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, a speedy trip that ignited an excruciatingly slow recovery. She started at a trauma center, then moved to a rehabilitation center, then endured months of intensive occupational and physical therapy from home. As the spring turned into summer, the physical pain subsided but it was replaced by a searing emotional pain. She missed the rest of the school year at Ransom Everglades, including major end-of-year speech and debate tournaments. The outpouring of love, support and kindness she felt from speech and debate students and families only amplified her feelings of loss and despondency: she feared a future without her passion. “For me, speech and debate is the perfect outlet for everything I believe in,” Hamm said. “I believe students need a voice. I have always believed students need to be heard … I don’t care if they win in speech and debate. I care about the confidence they gain in performing, the confidence they gain through the struggle ... They find a different way of looking at the world.” Her passion for that process drove the 12-plus-hour workdays that put her in the wrong place at the wrong time. It also drove her determination to get back to what always has been precisely the right place for her: The classroom. When the sun dawned on a new school year last August, Hamm was, indeed, back on campus, teaching two speech and debate courses and leading the school’s competitive team. Though less nimble, still afflicted by residual pain and stiffness, and extra cautious as she resumed her daily walks to and from school, she was brimming with enthusiasm. “When I came back, I was determined to be as creative as the kids were willing to be,” she said. “I was going to push them to try different things … I was so happy to have the opportunity to be creative again.” Her students have tapped into that creativity in ways that have electrified the entire program. Claudia Alejandra Colina-Güere ’25 and Lucas Sanchez ’27 assembled and refined a brilliant Duo Interpretation of Walkout by Edward James Olmos, which chronicles the peaceful efforts of Chicano students to bring change to the school system in Los Angeles. Colina-Güere and Sanchez earned first place last fall at the 2024 Yale Invitational in New Haven, ‘Students Need a Voice’ Kate Hamm rebounds from a traumatic accident to lead RE Speech and Debate Kate Hamm shows her love for her students