I couldn’t resist the title, an allusion to a Tony Richardson film (and Alan Sillitoe short story), but it really doesn’t work at all: the long-distance trips we’ve done in HHS Debate have been amazing experiences. I’ve gotten to see parts of the country (and world!) that I wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise, and we’ve been able to provide students with — in most cases — their first ever travel without their families. Getting students out of their comfort zones, eating food they aren’t accustomed to, talking to people with different accents… it pays a lot of dividends.
The HHS Debate advisors are paid a yearly stipend. If broken down by the hour worked, it would be a pittance, but this here is no complaint. On these trips our expenses are covered, and while some of our peers from other schools are better compensated, this is one area where I’m mostly satisfied (except when they’ve tried to deny us reimbursement for taxes and tips, but that is very likely a subject for another day if the three-year odyssey of attempting to get a standard operating procedure manual doesn’t come to fruition soon… #notathreat).
I inherited the Model United Nations from Bernadette Coyle, who had been taking students on two trips a year: Hershey YMCA in Pennsylvania and Princeton Model Congress. Hershey took place in the winter and was run by a control freak who demanded a mountain of work from each participant, attendance at a workshop a month or two prior to the conference, and work from the advisors during the conference. Outside the perk of a seeming endless supply of chocolate kisses in the hotel, we couldn’t wait to stop going to Hershey. And when we learned that students would room with college kids on campus — and that the faculty advisors were prohibited from campus at night, we were shocked the trip was approved. When we arrived in the morning of the second day of the trip and learned that one our students had disappeared and not returned to the dorm room she was supposed to be in, that cinched our decision to look for other places to go.
Our earliest long-distance trips (other than Hershey) were Yale Model Congress and the Ivy League Model United Nations Conference in Philadelphia. In the early years Yale was well run and a lot of fun, but the staff turnover led to some of the worst conferences we’ve ever attended (again, something for another day). ILMUNC was an absolutely enormous conference where our delegates struggled to ever get the floor to make speeches. Although the level of debate was strong, it seemed like an awful lot of money to spend for such little opportunity.
The National High School Model United Nations held at the actual United Nations in New York City was a trippy experience for our crew, but was like ILMUNC squared in terms of the opportunity to participate. That, and the hour it took every day to clear security, was something we’ve opted to forego subsequently. We mostly attend conferences from 300 to 600 participants and especially try to avoid the enormous ones with 1500 or more delegates. Johns Hopkins Model United Nations in Baltimore was a very good trip that got us a bit further away from home (and in my wife’s hometown), so for awhile that was our long-distance, high-water mark.
In 2002, we decided to get ambitious and with a very strong group of debaters, tried to get permission to go to Bath, England for our first international conference. There was still some understandable skittishness from people about foreign travel that soon after 9/11, and when Heathrow went on lockdown a few days before our proposal went before the Board of Education, we opted to withdraw the proposal rather than have a negative precedent set. We’ll never know what the decision would have been, but when we went before the Board the following year, it was approved.
We invited 12 students to go to Bath 2003. We arranged to spend one night in London, taking in some of the cool sites of the city (I had been to London with my wife and six-month-old daughter a few months prior). Then we boarded a bus and drove out to Bath. I’ll be sharing some memories of this trip another day, but it was a big success and whet our appetite for giving our students more travel opportunities in the future. We only returned to Europe one more time, but have since been to Canada twice and Mexico once. [Don’t tell anyone, but we’ll be going back to Europe in the 2020-2021 year, assuming the Board of Education signs off on our trip!]
Here’s the list of our long-distance adventures over the years, as much as I can reconstruct:
1994
Hershey YMCA Model United Nations (Hershey, PA)
1995
Hershey YMCA Model United Nations (Hershey, PA)
1996
Hershey YMCA Model United Nations (Hershey, PA)
1997
Yale Model Congress (New Haven, CT)
Ivy League Model United Nations (Philadelphia, PA)
1998
Yale Model Congress (New Haven, CT)
Ivy League Model United Nations (Philadelphia, PA)
1999
Yale Model Congress (New Haven, CT)
2000
Yale Model Congress (New Haven, CT)
2001
Yale Model Congress (New Haven, CT)
2002
Yale Model Congress (New Haven, CT)
2003
Johns Hopkins University Model United Nations (Baltimore, MD)
Princeton Model Congress (Washington, DC)
Bath Schools Model United Nations (Bath, England)
2004
Johns Hopkins University Model United Nations (Baltimore, MD)
2005
Harvard Model Congress (San Francisco, CA)
Berlin Model United Nations (Berlin, Germany)
2006
Vanderbilt Model United Nations (Nashville, TN)
Yale Model Congress (New Haven, CT)
2007
Secondary Schools UN Symposium (Montreal, Canada)
Philadelphia Model United Nations (Philadelphia, PA)
2008
Penn Model Congress (Philadelphia, PA)
Philadelphia Model United Nations (Philadelphia, PA)
2009
Virginia Model United Nations (Charlottesville, VA)
Duke University Model United Nations (Durham, NC)
Johns Hopkins University Model United Nations (Baltimore, MD)
2010
Washington Area Model United Nations Conference (Washington, DC)
Philadelphia Model United Nations (Philadelphia, PA)
2011
Harvard Model Congress (San Francisco, CA)
Vanderbilt Model United Nations (Nashville, TN)
Penn Model Congress (Philadelphia, PA)
2012
Duke University Model United Nations (Durham, NC)
Washington University Model United Nations Symposium (St. Louis, MO)
2013
Southern United States Model United Nations (Atlanta, GA)
Johns Hopkins University Model United Nations (Baltimore, MD)
2014
Regional High Schools Model United Nations (San Francisco, CA)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Model United Nations (2014)
2015
Southern United States Model United Nations (Atlanta, GA)
2016
HenMUN (Newark, DE)
Empire Model United Nations Conference (New York, NY)
2017
Vanderbilt Model United Nations (Nashville, TN)
University of Toronto Model United Nations (Toronto, CA)
2018
Florida High Schools Model United Nations (Kissimmee, FL)
Empire Model United Nations Conference (New York, NY)
2019
Mexico City International Model United Nations (Mexico City, Mexico)
Chicago International Model United Nations (Chicago, IL)
2020
Philadelphia Model United Nations (Philadelphia, PA)
Fenster on Education 