EMAC Activities Cancelled and Pushed-Up

Why Did EMAC Decide to Do Things Differently this Year?By Ingy Fahmy

The Eastern Mediterranean Activities Conference (EMAC) organization has decided to make some changes to this year’s activity’s calendar. To begin with, the High School Leadership Conference and the Middle School Festival got cancelled. Then the Academic Games got pushed-up a whole two seasons. All these events affected many students in Schutz, and the changes that took place might have been helpful to one student while being disparaging to another. Massimo Laterza, the EMAC Coordinator, explained that the decision to cancel both the HS Leadership Conference and MS Festival is a temporary decision that will only last for this year.
The cancellation was due to the fact that EMAC is currently undergoing a number of changes. There used to be a total of sixteen participating schools in the organization. However, due to controversies between the schools and within the organization, these 16 schools split into two different organizations, EMAC and Middle East School ‘s Activities Conference (MESAC). As a result, many schools have pulled out of this organization, which has led to a decreased number of participating schools.
Hence, the participating schools felt overwhelmed with the amount of events that they were hosting this academic year. As a result, none of them was capable of hosting both the HS Leadership Conference and the MS Festival. As for the Academic Games, it usually takes place in the late spring. This year, however, it got moved to take place during the early fall. Massimo Laterza elucidates this change to be due to the fact that most students who attend the Academic Games tend to be juniors and seniors who also happen to have Advanced Placement (AP) exams and SATs at around the same time of the event. This discouraged a lot of students to try out for the teams since they felt it would be taking away from their study time for these crucial exams.
Kelly Sullivan, who is the coach/advisor of both the HS Leadership Conference and Academic Games, said that many teachers have been asking the organization to move the dates of Academic Games to February, but for some reason they decided to move it to October.
All these events prove to be very effective on a student’s transcript for college. Therefore, the decisions made around these events are very crucial for all college prospective students. An anonymous senior expresses sadly that they have been saving to attend the HS Leadership Conference for their last year at school because they wanted it to be a memorable one and one that would look good on their transcript. We hope that next year the same unfortunate fate of the conference and festival does not affect yet another graduating class or eager students wanting to attend them.