Last week five students of Suffield High School participated in the 79th session of Model Congress held at American International College. Suffield High School’s delegation, Tabitha Hinkle and Marc Cox, along with our observer delegates Benjamin Grigoriou, Catherine Murphy and Veronica Partain made an excellent showing for our first year in attendance! Our team, along with students from ten other schools from within New England, developed mock legislation, held mock committees and debated fiercely to pass bills that would be appropriate for the United States today. While real legislation can take months –if not years–to pass, students who attended only had three days to debate what should become law!
Our Model Congress team put in a lot of hard work prior to attending by developing legislation, completing many hours of research on why our legislation should be passed, conducting mock committee sessions and reviewing committee procedures. On top of all of this, they only had about two weeks to review legislation from all of the other schools.
Suffield High School’s legislation outlined a procedure to dissuade individuals from producing harmful weapons on 3-D printers by developing a registration system for this technology. While our legislation ultimately was not chosen, many other schools agreed that this was a wonderful idea that needs to be looked at in the future. At the awards ceremony on Saturday night, Katie Murphy was awarded Best Observing Delegate.