Junior World Affairs Council hosted a debate Tuesday in the auditorium to give students a platform to express their opinions regarding the policies of U.S. Senate challenger Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D) and incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R).

“The JWAC Take a Side Tuesday for October was over the Beto versus Cruz election for the Senate,” club sponsor Tim Johannes said. “The Senate election is coming up here on November 6. We were trying to raise some awareness about issues here in the state. The kids were real excited about doing this. So we decided to give the issues that both people were in support of or against, I guess, and then there was some time for some discussion in some other stuff.”

Officers in JWAC have been working to organize the debate to ensure that it ran smoothly.

“I worked with another officer who we both work on it Take a Side Tuesday together,” JWAC officer Brayden Miller said. “So we developed background information to get the students so that they would be prepared. We also devised questions and different topics that we get a good discussion.”

The club aims to inform students about issues that go beyond the campus.

“JWAC aims to talk a lot about state, national, and international issues. So on the national level, even though the midterms, here are obviously Texas state midterms, they’re gaining a lot of national importance not only just about the Texas politics in the future of Texas, of voting, the importance of making your voice heard and the importance of how politics in america will change in the future,” Miller said. “I wanted to make sure that because students are a lot more involved in politics today, we continue that trend and we have an open discussion. We think it went really well. A lot of people turned out a lot of different kids volunteered, we had a lot of diversity and opinion and perspective. I think a lot of the different students learned a lot from each other and learned a lot about the midterms and what’s happening right now.”

Some students felt as if the debate could’ve gone a different direction by addressing more topics.

“I feel like the questions could have been stronger and more polarizing,” senior Tay Nguyen said. “They were mostly very moderate and they focus on millennial point of view instead of asking about specific topics such as immigration or abortion.”

Johannes believes that the future of the country depends on students performing their civic duty.

“The future of this country rests with the youth and you guys as students will learn how to be good citizens and part of our job is teachers and public school and all schools is to teach them about how to be good citizens in the future,” Johannes said. “The most important thing is to be well informed of the issues and find out things from multiple sources.”