Katherine Balbin & Ashley Ramirez
November 21, 2023
Port Chester High School recently made a new edition to their club roster; Model UN, with Mr. Collins and Mr. Harnett as their club advisors. Most schools have this club and they compete at a very high level. Due to Port Chester adding the club this year, the advisors decided to start off with something easier to help the students get a feel for the club. To start off the new club, they attended a conference at The Ursuline School in New Rochelle.
This conference was hosted by The Ursuline School on November 4th. This event was organized by Head Chair Mary Claire Stutterlin and Crisis Director Justine Dolan. This conference is referred to as a Crisis Conference. This entails a less formal conference about fictional subjects. The Ursuline School Model UN Conference (TUSMUNC) chose for them to be a part of the Gilmore Girls Committee. The Gilmore Committee wasn’t the only one being hosted that day; they had 6 other committees aimed for middle school students. There would be a delegate for each character in the show making it a total of 17 delegates. There were only five slots left for this committee due to a school backing out last minute. Not only did the school back out but they left two very important characters meaning that Port Chester had to give it their all. Sophomores Ashley Ramirez and Santiago Velasco, alongside juniors Emmanuel Coyt, Kanishka Petal, and Katherine Balbin attended this year’s TUSMUNC VI with no past experience and only two weeks of preparation.
They went against two schools: The Masters Schools and The Ursuline School. These schools had at least two months to prepare their delegates for this conference. Both The Masters School and The Ursuline School are private high schools that have had similar clubs running for multiple years, leaving them with a slight advantage. The conference was made up of four distinct committee sessions. The first session lasted an hour and thirty minutes were added on to the remaining sessions. Delegates had ten minute breaks in between session 1 and 2 and session 3 and 4. During their lunch time delegates were able to interact with the other schools as themselves and not as their characters.