Royal Oak Hosts Big Model United Nations Confab

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The Royal Oak High School Model United Nations team, made up of members of the high school’s international debate team, will host Michigan’s largest Model United Nations conference next month.

More than 30 high schools and 1,000 students are expected to participate in the event, to be held from 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, at Royal Oak High School.

Royal Oak’s Model UN team has been involved in the internationally recognized program every year in the 20-year history of the SouthEast Michigan Model United Nations AssocIation (SEMMUNA) conference.

“It made sense for Royal Oak to host the SEMMUNA conference this year,” Steve Chisnell, a Royal Oak High School teacher, and adviser to the Model UN team, said in a news release.

Chisnell and Sue Zimmerman, a former adviser to Dearborn’s Model United Nations team, cofounded SEMMUNA in 1995. Just 80 students were involved two decades ago.

The conference is hosted by different high schools each fall. Royal Oak has hosted the conference several times in earlier years, but never when it was this size.

“We’ve grown new programs around Michigan, we’ve helped foster a positive spirit of debate here, and we’ve inspired thousands of students to help solve the tough issues in the world,” Chisnell said. “The Association now offers scholarships to seniors, mentors new schools, and has branched out from its original mission, soon to form a League of Model UN programs and conferences throughout Michigan.

That league is the plan of SEMMUNA’s new director, Matt MacLeod of Bloomfield Hills High School Model UN.

MacLeod has successfully connected every Model United Nations program in Michigan as an active partner in SEMMUNA’s goals. University and professional programs from Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, Oakland University and Eastern Michigan University, for example, will participate in the Nov. 7 event.

Royal Oak Model United Nations

The Royal Oak team has been working since last spring in preparation for the conference. Olivia Decker, a junior at ROHS, is the conference secretary-general, assigned to over-seeing all of the day’s work.

“I really love organizing,” said Decker, who helped coordinate the conference last year. “We’ve been using the app BaseCamp to keep track of our various committees, we’ve met in the evenings and weekends and this summer to prepare, and we’ll be working right up until Nov. 7 to bring it all together. It’s a lot of fun.”

Most of Royal Oak’s veteran members, about two dozen, will be working behind the scenes with techers to make the conference successful. Each has been in charge of a committee assigned specific tasks, from meal coordination to debate room mapping, to organization of the Secretariat and even crisis intervention.

The team’s younger members, another 30, will debate during the day, learning how Model UN works.

A Unique Model UN Experience

The SEMMUNA conference is fairly unique among Model UN conferences, consciously moving away from competitive challenges and focusing more on the educational experience of international diplomacy.

Thirty-six different debates on topics ranging from human rights for women in Saudi Arabia to the Iranian nuclear deal will be discussed among United Nations member states, each represented by a student from a different school.

The real UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has encouraged Model UN conferences to focus on collaboration and consensus-building and to move away from a system which encourages competition.

The SEMMUNA conference has always been a training conference, Chisnell said, “and we want every student to learn how policies are made, how countries reason, and where breakdowns in negotiations are often repairable.”

The Nov. 7 conference is unique because of several other features.

First, it will operate an active press corps of students who will write and video stories from the conference, supported by ROHS teachers Ann Maudlin and Michael Conrad. Debaters can also set up their own “press conferences” to speak publicly about the situation they are in and field questions from reporters.

Social studies teacher Alec Snyder will coordinate a Crisis Team which will spring fictional emergency situations from around the world onto committees to complicate their debate.

And all of this will be coordinated and distributed through a planned Twitter network of hashtags that student delegates can access during the conference.

“It’s an experiment,” Chisnell said, “but we’re silly to believe that the social media tools at our disposal are unimportant when we’re in educational settings, or in global political ones. It’s likely to be unpredictable.”

» Photo via SouthEast Michigan Model United Nations AssocIation