Want to stop child labor?
Those are some of the suggestions a group of international students came up with during InterConnections 21, a United Nations student conference on human rights Dec. 7-8 in New York.
Two Missoula students from Sussex School - Faith Morrison and Brittany Wilson - and Sussex teacher Jen Ellis attended this year's session, the second time students from Sussex have participated in the 3-year-old program. They left Missoula on Dec. 6 and returned Dec. 10.
Sussex is involved in the Associated Schools Project, which is sponsoring the United Nations program. Established in 1953, the project is designed to encourage schools to work in four areas: promotion of human rights and democracy; teaching about the United Nations system and global issues; cross-cultural learning; and preservation of world heritage sites, both cultural and natural. Sussex, a private school, focuses on environmental issues.
Students in seventh through 12th grades from around the world participated in the special United Nations Department of Public Information conference, which focused on issues of child labor, land mines, rights and responsibility and education.
Morrison and Wilson, eighth-graders at Sussex School, focused on child labor, a subject they had studied at Sussex the previous year.
"Last year," Wilson said, "we had a really small project on it. I became interested."
The students spent Dec. 8 studying the subject before coming up with a declaration of solutions that will be posted on the Web at www.ic21.org.
Other solutions to child labor proposed during the U.N. session include forcing companies to hire adults instead of children, encouraging adults to protest for a living wage and installing laws that require children to go to school.
"One of the things we were pushing for is education. Education leads a lot of people out of factories," Wilson said.
More money should go to help the needy, the duo said. "(Then) needy families wouldn't have to send a child to work," Wilson explained.
"But we're spending money on cosmetics," she added with a little disgust, "... and clothes."
They also learned that maybe it is better to teach second- and third-graders about human rights.
"I learned about it in high school. I wish I had learned earlier," said Morrison.
Morrison said Sussex School has been collecting used CDs at the school to help raise money for an addition to a school in Nepal that was built thanks to Children's Second Chance, a group at the University of Montana.
Also at the United Nations meeting, the Sussex students met an Australian woman who makes fund-raising dolls for different programs. The kids each painted a piece of material that then is made into a doll and auctioned. Money from that project is used to cope with land mines in Sierra Leone.
"Each year is better," said Ellis, a language arts and social studies teacher who also attended the 1999 United Nations session. "There is more opportunity for students to have their voices heard. It's exciting."
Also exciting, the trio agreed, was seeing New York. Seeing the art that usually is available only through books. Seeing the people from all over the world walking down the streets and speaking other languages.
"We liked being exposed," Wilson said.
Future trips, which are extracurricular and must be paid for by the participants, will continue, said Ellis, if the students are interested and qualified.
"I will take them, but it's not guaranteed," she said.
Reporter Donna Syvertson can be reached at 523-5361 or at dsyvertson@missoulian.com.
How to help
If you have CDs to donate to Sussex School's fund-raising effort, either call the school at 549-8327 or drop them by the school, 1800 S. Second St. W.
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