Classes Without Borders

Next week, local students get a chance to address the U.N.

by J.F. Pirro

immigration

After his parents separated and his mother returned to her native Mexico to care for her ailing father, 14-year-old Dennis Fox faced a decision. He could stay there with her, or he could board a Greyhound bus and return to Philadelphia alone.

He opted for the somber, four-day, 3,000-mile ride, but it wasn't the time on the bus that worried him most. "I wondered where I'd live," he says of that July 2003 experience. "My options were narrow."

A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: GEM president Wayne Jacoby. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Now a senior at West Catholic High, Fox lived by himself in a West Philly apartment for a couple of weeks, then with young Latino immigrant friends in South Philly before moving in with soccer coach Francis Crowley's family in Drexel Hill, where he still lives.

Come Wednesday, Fox will travel to the United Nations headquarters in New York City. There, he'll be one of 50 "international leaders" attending the ninth annual United Nations Student Conference on Human Rights (UNSCHR). Then, after two days of training at the U.N. International School, he'll help conduct a live, interactive dialogue with hundreds of student regional leaders in a videoconference that will be Webcast at 10 satellite sites across the globe on Dec. 1. One of the sites is West Philly's High School of the Future, the Bill Gates-inspired high-tech, paperless school; others are as far away as the Persian Gulf and Mexico City.

Fox, an early-decision applicant to the University of Pennsylvania who wants to become a lawyer and politician, is an unusually good match for this year's UNSCHR theme, "Migration and Development: Challenges for Human Rights." Not only is he the son of a Mexican immigrant, but last April, he roused classmates to attend the "Day Without an Immigrant" rally in Love Park, where he took center stage and spoke about human rights for immigrants. He also teaches basic English to Latino immigrants Saturday mornings at Juntos, a Mexican community center in South Philadelphia.

"There, I realize just how difficult the life of an immigrant is," he says. "Most immigrants simply want to work and improve their lives."

Germantown's Global Education Motivators (GEM) is one of four founding UNSCHR co-sponsors. The 25-year-old Chestnut Hill College-based organization aims to "bring the world into the classroom," according to president Wayne Jacoby, a retired high school social-studies teacher from Montgomery County. He selected this region's 11 "international leaders." Some 300 representatives from 20 area schools attended an Oct. 30 workshop at Chestnut Hill, where they chose the 50 regional leaders expected at the School of the Future for the Webcast.

"Adults won't be running it," Jacoby says. "They will be. It's real student empowerment."

The summit will focus on five migration and development subthemes — like the difference between legal and illegal immigrants, and "voluntary" and "involuntary" immigrants. The leaders will draft a plan of action they'll present to the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Bahrain's H.E. Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa. They will ask that it be disseminated to U.N. member states, as it has been before.

The first UNSCHR was held on Dec. 10, 1998, the 50th anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Before 9/11, UNSCHR was a multiple-day event for 600 to 700 students at the U.N. But after 9/11, security concerns led Jacoby to propose the current high-tech format. No student will be "walking in the shoes of another country," he says. "They'll actually be from that country."

During UNSCHR's first video conference in 2001, a 12-year-old girl from Cairo denounced that year's human-rights theme — racism. She called for a refusal to listen to the "old voices of hatred and fear," but instead "to listen to the voices of the young, who want peace and love."

Jacoby says that memory left a mark.

"It sold me on just how well this can work, does work and will always work," he says. "There's an immense power connected to this. What I like is the kids get cross-cultural perspectives. It could be a Quaker school or an inner-city school, but each will be telling the rest of the world what to do."

(j_pirro@citypaper.net