Model UN

2023-2024 Model UN Final Report from Mr. Barton
Printable PDF 

For several years now, it has been a custom for the  Model UN Delegation to present its annual report.  This report has now become something of a chronicle as children of Booker T., members of the delegation, think – and live – through the great crises of this time.

This year was certainly no exception to the rule.  Before its official start in November, the current eighth grade delegates were planning and preparing for the MUN season proper when the October 7th attacks occurred.  As with the rest of the school, many delegates were personally affected by October 7th just as they have been by the reactions to it and the histories that precede it.   In that moment, the delegates resolved to work carefully as they sought to reason, feel and express in language their responses to the day and its aftermath.  To figure out how to do this truthfully, intelligently and yet sensitively in a diverse public school, in person and yet in the long shadow of social media is a complex challenge.

Thus, as its first move, delegates reached out to alumni of the delegation who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and asked them a single question: “how should one begin to learn about a conflict?”  Despite their own personal stress and the demands of their own lives, nearly fifty alumni responded.  These alumni are from a vast variety of backgrounds and experiences.  One even wrote from a shelter in an area that was under attack.  Though their responses varied, in temper and in political viewpoint, they all shared a single ethos – a commitment to keep eyes, minds and hearts open in the days, weeks and months ahead, a desire to think in complicated ways and with an absolute commitment to scholarship in terms of history, economics, comparative religion, ethics and law.   The delegates put together these responses into a single book that ran well over a hundred pages.

Buoyed by the warm, supportive response, the eighth graders continued meeting every single day, even as they prepared for the high school exam, working together to process what was happening and, similarly, learning how to deal with the confusion of both social and traditional media.  Alumni with roots in the region came to address them in person.  The current delegates themselves, several of whom are fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, used their skills to analyze local sources.  Inspired by OSINT (open-source intelligence) reportage, delegates analyzed maps and photographs to question how different media were representing the same events.  That these courageous eighth graders also did this in successive moments of overwhelming horror made their work even more remarkable.  

As soon as the whole delegation assembled for the first time in November, the first official order of business for the new year, then, was the selection of a topic for in-depth study.  As its first act of self-constitution, every year the delegation democratically chooses a single critical event to delve into for several months.  The purpose of this study is to challenge delegates, in a debate-like forum, to think through a problem from as many angles as possible.  This year, the delegation chose to study the United States’ response to 9/11. 

In keeping with a longstanding tradition, delegates reached out to many experts and eyewitnesses of the 9/11 attacks, including health professionals, survivors and widowers.  A rabbi and an Islamic scholar, whose daughters are alumni of MS54 MUN, came into school to speak about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in relation to the attack.  A member of the Ground Zero bucket brigade visited and talked movingly about his service at the site.  Finally, the delegation had the honor to receive one of the original Guantanamo Bay defense lawyers whose stirring presentation on due process helped the delegation finally settle upon the question it would take up for its final debate.  

The debate is the culmination of months of work studying, researching, debating and writing.  The delegates this year decided to debate the fate of “9/11 mastermind” Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who, after decades in detention, is still held in Guantanamo.  The question that they decided upon was whether KSM should face a military trial with the possibility of a death sentence or whether he should, because of past torture in CIA custody, receive a plea deal.  This seemingly straight-forward question entailed many rich side debates which touched upon due process, Constitutional (specifically the Fifth and Eighth Amendments) and human rights, victims’ rights, the history of torture in the War on Terror, the murder of Daniel Pearl, trade-offs in relation to national security, the importance and problems of state secrets, the nature and jurisdictional status of Guantanamo Bay, the impact of religion upon society, the ethics of the death penalty and, ultimately, the definition of justice.  As the delegates collaboratively prepped for this debate, they were able to analyze the forensic, rhetorical and evidentiary strategies of both the South African and Israeli legal teams as they presented their opening statements in the historic ICJ case as broadcast in January.   

On March 22nd and 23rd of this year, all 58 delegates of the MS54 Model UN delegation attended the international MUN conference in midtown.  Working with high school and middle school students from around the world and the country, delegates were able to use the analytical, research and oratorical skills that they had developed, with great discipline and dedication, in the four months prior to the conference.  Here, they combined these skills with new challenges – networking, politicking, negotiating and collectively drafting resolutions.  The delegates were assigned countries and committees with four specific issues in the docket:  humanitarian aid and disaster response, food waste and poverty, climate change and economic growth/job creation.  Though these topics are very different, each of the committees was also tasked to explore how artificial intelligence would impact, both positively and negatively, each particular topic – a great challenge indeed.  Inside of these four committees, our delegates represented Afghanistan, Algeria, Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Lebanon, Niger, Singapore, Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen.  Many of our delegates were singled out for their exemplary work in leadership and writing.  The delegation as a whole received the Secretary General’s Award for superlative diplomatic efforts.  As a sign of the times, the keynote speaker at the conference, an ambassador from a country currently sitting in the UN Security Council, was delayed from addressing the delegates due to his participation in an actual ceasefire debate at the UN headquarters.  

This year also marked the first year since COVID when our delegates attended more than one conference – a unique test of stamina, attention and persistence rendered all the more difficult by the overall erosion of these qualities during the pandemic years.  Booker T. delegates were the only middle schoolers in attendance at the Beacon High School Model UN conference held in early May.  Here, twenty of our delegates represented several countries in three different committees: DISEC where the topic was cyber-warfare and where three of our delegates were honored with the challenge of representing the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and the US; SOCHUM where the topic was wildlife trafficking; and a historical G-77 committee set in 1975 debating both IMF reform and the influence of proxy wars on international development.  In preparing for this last committee, delegates, for the first time, debated the nature and extent of US military involvement, past, present and future, in contemporary Ukraine and compared the old to the new Cold War, a hitherto taboo subject.  In fact, two delegates from this last committee, an eighth grader and a seventh grader, representing Benin and the Central African Republic respectively, were commended before the entire conference for their contributions, a very rare distinction for middle school students.  Three seventh graders in the SOCHUM committee, representing Indonesia, Kenya and the Philippines, sponsored a draft resolution and safely secured it to passage.  Two Booker T. seventh graders from the DISEC committee, representing Brazil and Denmark, created a website which they created for the conference showcasing their own prototype for an anti-hacker system.  The conference concluded with these two receiving plaudits for their initiative.  

Four delegates also attended a US Model Congress at Beacon in mid-May.  This was the first time our delegates have attended such an event.  They were assisted in this by the president of Beacon’s Model Congress, the organizer of the event and one of the congress’s key delegates, all of whom are alumni of MS54’s MUN delegation.  Our eighth graders were assigned two Republicans and two Democrats, Katie Britt, Chris von Hollen, Cynthia Lummis and Tina Smith, in the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.  There they drafted bills on the topics of gentrification and the housing shortage.  All four had to adapt to rhetoric more suited to the polarized and electorally tenuous environments of the US legislative branch.  One of the delegates, at her first ever congress, even managed to achieve recognition for her convincing portrayal of a Republic senator with views widely divergent from her own.  All four of these delegates showed great courage and determination as they participated in a third conference in a new format in a crowd of high school students.  

All the delegates of Booker T. MUN deserve recognition for their great sacrifice of time and their great exertions over the last year.