Model UN (United Nations), a worldwide organization, has recently returned to RHS with a new chapter created this year. The team has participated in three conferences, with their most recent conference as a team occurring in New York City the weekend of March 11.

The team traveled to New York City in order to participate in the National High School Model United Nations (NHSMUN) session 1 conference March 11. Sponsored by United Nations annually, delegates from high schools all around the world come to represent a country or person to participate in a variety of committees concerning everything from poaching to xenophobia. The RHS team has also participated in one other conference at Centennial HS, and sent co-president senior Adam Schneider to participate in another conference April 1.

The team meets frequently to prepare and plan for conferences, as well as research their assigned topics and countries. For the NHSMUN conference, they represented Guinea, a small country in West Africa. For each conference, each team is assigned a country or issue, and they then prepare accordingly, researching the opinions of the country in order to accurately represent it.

“[Model UN] has really allowed me to do some self-reflection, you go to these conferences, and you meet thousands of people you don’t know, and it helped me with my speech and debate, and also national and international awareness,” RHS Model UN co-president senior Adam Schneider said. “It really opens your eyes to the issues at hand.”

At conferences, the team interacts and negotiates with other schools who are representing other countries around the world.

“Some of the strengths of the team are their passion for international relations, some of them get really into it, when they get assigned a topic that particularly is of interest to them, or a country that they’re interested in, and they don’t seem to back down from any kind of a challenge,” social studies teacher and Model UN Sponsor Jillian Kennedy said.

In the coming years, Kennedy said she hopes to see even more members of all grades join the team in order to expand it, even possibly to a class. In many schools that participate in conferences such as the NHSMUN conference, Model UN is actually offered as a course rather than just an extracurricular.

“Model UN is an opportunity for the school community to embrace the diversity within the world. We are a microcosm of the world, with all our students, and our diversity of students, it all reflects well on Rockville high school,” Assistant Principal John Haas said. “Model UN also reflects well on the true nature of Montgomery County and of Rockville High School.”