A Burnaby French immersion student ready to tackle tough social issues has won first place in a provincial public speaking competition for the second year in a row.
Last year, Moscrop Secondary’s Sarra Pirmohamed took top spot in the Grade 9 French immersion category of the Canadian Parents for French Concours d’art oratoire with a speech about the fentanyl crisis.
This year she won with a speech about missing and murdered Aboriginal women in B.C.
The provincial finals took place at SFU’s Surrey campus, with 235 finalists from across the province competing. The finalists had been whittled down from 10,000 total B.C. participants, according to CPF Yukon and B.C.
Twenty speakers from Burnaby qualified.
One other local orator besides Pirmohamed earned a first place.
Burnaby North Grade 9 student Emily Liu captured first in the core French category for a speech titled “Le temps.”
Three other local speakers – all from Moscrop –earned third-place honours: Grade 9 immersion student Michelle Fong for “La generation X”; Grade 11 core French student Andrea Guerrero Chiprout for “Comment les portables et l’internet influencent notre vie”; and Grade 12 late immersion student Prajal Biswas for “La lumière du cinema.”
