Beginning in Fall 2023, Laura will serve as the Director of Speech and Debate at West Tallahatchie County High School. In this role, she will serve as the instructor for the Oral Communication class and the coach for the competition team (which will be housed within the class). As one of the first speech and debate programs in the Mississippi Delta, she will develop and regionally and nationally competitive program. For updates on the current teams progress, go the to the W Tally Speech and Debate teams website for more information.

Prior to this, Laura volunteered as a high school debate coach, specializing in Lincoln-Douglas (LD) and Policy (CX) debate, for the past 15 years and has worked with programs throughout South Mississippi and Denver, Colorado. She was fortunate to grow up in a home that supported all things speech and debate — her mother was a speech and theater coach at both the high school and collegiate level including Manatee County HS in Florida and the University of Southern Mississippi, and her father was a high school and collegiate policy debater at Northglenn HS in Colorado and the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a strong supporter of all things speech and debate as it proved to be transformative during her high school years, and continues to be instrumental in teaching both civic education and democratic participation. For more information, see the National Speech and Debate Association. 

Laura particularly supports the role of speech and debate in elevating the voices of historically oppressed communities, including women and gender non-conforming individuals, members of the LGBTQ community, communities of color, low-income individuals, and people with disabilities. For more information, see the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, the Women's Debate Institute, and Girls Debate (a blog ran by the ladies of the Harvard-Westlake debate team). 

During the summer of 2018, Laura was asked to serve as an instructor at The Debate Intensive (formerly the San Jose Debate Intensive), one of the most prestigious LD debate camps in the country. She served as a 2018 debate instructor teaching policy debate and philosophy to LD students for those in the third ranking lab — the lab focusing on students advancing from local circuit to national circuit debate.