Mrs. Redmond and several students of Dallas High School attended the United Nations Day on October 30, 2006 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania .

The program was held at Chestnut Hill College outside of Philadelphia . It was the tenth annual conference in honor of United Nations Day.

The topic was migration and development: challenges for human rights. The keynote speaker, Carol Bellamy, was the former executive director of UNICEF and an executive of the United Nations. In 2005, she began leading World Learning, a program promoting cultural understanding, democracy, social justice, and educational development. It fields projects in over one hundred countries on five continents. Her keynote speech mainly focused on children as the neglected face of migration.

There were six students that attended the program with Mrs. Redmond. David Hunter, Andrew Edgar, Casey Baldwin, Imran Khan, Anna Kammen, and Peter Blanchard represented Dallas High School. Transportation was provided by Mrs. Redmond and her Redmond Van.

After the keynote speech was given, students were sent to different classroom discussions depending on the topic of migration. Dallas High School discussed the topic of Regular and Irregular Migration. The facilitator, Enid Adler, brought up interesting questions and allowed for discussion among the different schools participating.

“Young people need to be aware of what’s going on in the world,”said Mrs. Redmond, “because they are the ones that will inherit the next generation.”

At the end of the discussions and workshops, a question and answer period was allowed for students interested in what the United Nations was currently doing or not doing.

“I got to see migration from different viewpoints of many different areas of the world, and not just the United States’ perspective,” commented Andrew Edgar about the trip as a whole.

United Nations Day was not a competitive tournament, but a great learning experience and allowed for open-mindedness on a generally uncomfortable subject such as migration.

This was Dallas High School’s first year attending in UN Day, and hopefully Dallas will continue to support engagement in related activities. As for further trips, Mrs. Redmond felt, “it is possible that we might attend more conferences related to these now that we know the general scope.”