LOS ALTOS INTERMEDIATE SCHOOL, CAMARILLO : Snack Sales Keep Speeches From Being Silenced

“It’s amazing what you can do with very little money,” Marilyn Bjork says, “if it’s important enough.”

Bjork specializes in speech at Los Altos Intermediate School in Camarillo, and has been teaching there for 23 years. Under her direction, the Los Altos speech team competes with Monte Vista Intermediate School (also in Camarillo) and 14 private schools in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

Bjork serves as president of the league, and helped found it 15 years ago. Since then, she’s seen almost all the other participating public schools drop out for lack of money or lack of interest.

“It’s so important to me that there was no way I would let it die,” Bjork says. “We sold candy bars, I can tell you, for years.”

Her three speech classes include about 90 kids, of whom 35 to 40 travel to tournaments every month.

There are a dozen categories, from humorous interpretation to sight reading, which requires students to make public addresses of up to eight minutes.

“These kids are on stage all the time,” Bjork says.

Their registration fees amount to about $1,000 a year, she says, $800 of which is covered by money from the state. Then there are the costs of travel, equipment for the campus performing arts room and the year-end awards banquet.

The awards come from Bjork’s garage, where her husband reconditions old trophies. Other funds come from speech club snack sales.

“We sell every morning at 10--chips and nuts and fruit rolls and drinks and cookies,” Bjork says. “We clear, in a school year, about $1,000 or $1,200.”

Wouldn’t she rather be spending that energy on other projects and getting more school system support?

“This has been a problem for so long,” Bjork says, “that we really don’t expect the money to come in.”