Global economics, high-school style

<p>Don't blame Alex Arreola if his group didn't win the prize for best food at Sonoma Valley High's International Economic Summit Friday.</p><p>Arreola, a junior at Sonoma Valley High, was on team Australia so he was serving Kraft Vegemite on slightly stale bread. </p><p>The Vegemite wasn't moving as fast as his passion fruit cheesecake that didn't have any passion fruit in it.</p><p>“One of Australia's specialties is passion fruit cheesecake but since there is no passion fruit here we were like, ‘Well, let's just bring cheesecake!'” he said.</p><p>Arreola was one of about 145 high school entrepreneur and finance students from Sonoma Valley, Rancho Cotate and Petaluma High schools who gathered Friday for an all-day economic summit that organizers hoped would drive home lessons of trade policies, supply and demand and cultural influences on global marketing.</p><p>“They can learn by doing,” said organizer Lucy Lucchesi, who teachers entrepreneurship at Sonoma Valley High. “They can take these economic concepts and put them into action.”</p><p>Teams of three and four students manned tables that displayed attributes of the countries they represented. Most students cooked native foods and some dressed up. Walls were covered with information on each country's standard of living such as gross domestic product, average years of education and life expectancy.</p><p>As the day progressed, participants were scored on their ability to barter and trade with other countries for needed supplies, services and technology. The more developed countries were required to offer assistance to developing nations.</p><p>“In entrepreneurship class they are learning to run their own business and we run the student store, so that is very local. I wanted them to get an idea of global marking and international business,” said Deb Fitch, a teacher a Petaluma High School.</p><p>The world trade simulation curriculum was developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and students have been working on global concepts for about two months, organizers said.</p><p>Students form alliances with other countries and don't pay point tariffs for working within those partnerships. Teams earn points for making moves that improve the standard of living in their country.</p><p>“Employers are always telling us ‘We need employees with soft skills, those are harder to train than technical skills,'” Lucchesi said. “They learn teamwork, communication skills, leadership, profit management.”</p><p>But much of the early excitement Friday involved the food.</p><p>While Arreola wasn't getting a lot of traffic for his Vegemite, Petaluma High senior Amy Arellano's apple carnival buns from Denmark were gone by 10 a.m.</p><p>Sonoma senior Kyle Clouse, decked out in a toga, broke out his all-American grill to serve up some self-described tasty Grecian treats.</p><p>“We made some sweet lamb burgers. I was pretty impressed with my cooking. I used the George Foreman,” he said.</p><p>Clouse's team Greece took first place in the costume category despite forgoing the traditional olive branch for a head wreath and instead using a branch from a bush somewhere on campus.</p><p>“They look allright,” he said. “They can probably pass for olive from far away.”</p>