St. Paul Academy’s World Savvy team really is world savvy, taking second place in the senior performance division at the 2014 invitational which was held at Augsburg College. This year’s competition theme was population and progress. The team focused its performance on the educational disparities between rural and urban primary schools in Indonesia, China, and Minnesota.

The team addressed this broad, multifaceted issue in ten minutes with a mock United Nations press conference, interviewing key figures who ranged from professionals to teachers to teenagers and presented various diverse perspectives on the issue. “It was a really fun experience overall. I think we had a great presentation and it was fun to see others’ work too!” team member Aliza Rahman said.

The competition opened with a welcome from World Savvy’s founder, Dana Mortenson, a few words from Senator Amy Klobuchar, and a broader, more philosophical speech about the global meaning of life from Daniel Wordsworth, CEO of the American Refugee Society.

The team also participated in a series of Action Round-tables and Knowledge to Action Plan workshops. It was a day dedicated to becoming more savvy about the issues which plague the global community in the present and in the future.