Model UN had a competition Tuesday, Feb. 25, at the Gratiot-Isabella RESD. Three countries were represented by St. Louis: Australia by Robert Long-Terwilliger, France by Jasmine Pontius, and China by Evelynn Gutierrez and Jaszmine Harbor.

Advisor Matt Burleson shared, “We had three countries [representatives] on the speaker’s list who spoke. One of the three actually got their resolution passed by the general assembly which is a pretty big deal.”

Pontius got her resolution representing France passed by the general assembly. Burleson said, “It was a topic of substance abuse. The general topic was world health and France chose the topic of substance abuse as her primary focus.”

Harbor shared, “I have never seen such a group of teenagers act so professional on the topic that we are assigned. My partner Evelynn Gutierrez and I had to write a resolution as the country of China about world health. We decided to write about the coronavirus at the meet. Our resolution sadly got declined, but this encourages us to try harder.”

This was the Model UN group’s second and final competition for the year. It’s a young group, and this was Burleson’s first year taking over as advisor. Burleson shared, “It’s very young, the group is: mostly freshmen and sophomores. I only have one senior…This is also my very first year of doing Model UN, so the first competition was kind of a shot in the dark.”

Burleson added, “This competition we did better. There’s still room to improve, [but] we’re making progress. The Model UN group is heading in the right direction. We just dealt with a lot of inexperience this year; some of it was my own inexperience. I’m still learning stuff all the way through the last competitions.”