Columbia Hosts Free Model U.N. Event

This Saturday, Columbia will host a summit of Latin American leaders, and NATO will work toward stopping the genocide in Darfur-sort of.

Columbia University Model United Nations is launching a new program that will give New York City public school students a chance to attend free, one-day Model U.N. conferences in an attempt to increase the number of New York City public schools that participate in the organization.

Ronald Towns, CC '08, Adeline Lo CC '08, and Ethan Frisch, City College of New York '08, created the program after the executive board of Columbia Model U.N., on which Lo serves as the vice president for campus events, decided that it could not sponsor students who could not afford to attend the weekend long high school conference. "We always have a money problem," Lo said about the ABC-funded club, which Lo said pays $2,000 per conference that the Columbia team attends.

The program hopes to better prepare schools to participate in other conferences by "basically teaching them the ropes," Frisch said.

For some New York City schools, the fees-which for the most recent conference were $65 per student, $40 per teacher, and $55 per school-were prohibitive.

"I was shocked at how expensive it was," said Pamela AuCoin, a teacher at Queens High School for the Sciences whose Model U.N. team will participate in Saturday's program, about the price tag on standard model U.N. conferences.

Organizers said that they hope the program-aimed at students who have little experience or who cannot afford registration fees at standard conferences-will grow to include more schools and will become a monthly event. There are currently simulations scheduled for March and April.

In past years, only one high school team from New York City participated at Columbia's Model U.N. high school conference. This year three out of the 31 schools that attended the high school conference held at Columbia last weekend were public schools from within New York City.

"They [high school Model U.N. participants] have this image of Columbia as being very prestigious, and they feel they aren't prepared," Towns said about some of the New York City high schools.

Queens High School for the Sciences will join Brooklyn International High School and Bronx High School of Science, one of New York City's specialized high schools, whose team won multiple awards at last weekend's conference.

Stuart Symons, who teaches history and runs the Model U.N. club at Bronx Science, said that he hopes that some of his club's newer members will be more prepared when they attend a conference of thousands of students hosted in the U.N. building in May.

"It's very hard to get noticed in a group that size ... so the idea is that the students develop their skills much earlier," he said.

AuCoin's group is trying out Model U.N. for the first time. "We are all a little nervous because we have never done it before, but the kids are really excited," she said.