Orientation Held For Boys State
Alan Olson Trending
WHEELING -- High school boys were prepped for the upcoming American Legion Boys State program, slated for the first week of June after a two-year hiatus due to COVID.
Ten boys assembled at Wheeling Park High School for the orientation for Boys State 2022, a statewide program aimed at giving kids hands-on experience working in a simulated civil service environment.
Director Jim Davis explained that the boys will spend the weeklong program learning about how various civic programs work, such as managing budgets between competing simulated programs, organizing into larger and smaller cabins to simulate larger or smaller cities, and representing simulated school boards.
"One boy, he'll be elected to the county school board, and we'll say there's two schools in the county -- one wants a new football field, the other needs two new buses," Davis said. "This is the problem you run into, where you've only for $400,000, so you have to come up with a budget where you buy one bus and do the visitor's side, or something like that."
Between orientation Wednesday and the June program, Davis said, students will be studying for the mock bar exam, for the myriad roles which require legal experience, aided by local judges and lawyers at the program's home of Jackson Mills, in Lewis County. This has been the site since the inaugural event in 1937, with West Virginia the second state to introduce a Boys State program, after Illinois.
Wheeling Central High School student Drew Murray said he hopes to use the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of government, demystifying an often byzantine and arcane area of public life.
"The government's obviously something not a lot of people understand, so this is a good opportunity to learn about the inside and what goes on, just try to learn a little bit deeper about it," Murray said.
Wheeling mayor Glenn Elliott was also in attendance. Having attended Boys State in his youth, Elliott hopes the kids will use the knowledge they cultivate to penetrate the often daunting world of politics.
"It was a very exciting experience for me. I didn't really have a full appreciation for what a government service was until we went down there, and did the Boys State experience," Elliott said. "I met kids from across the state who I remained pen pals with, in the pre-internet days. I made some good friends down there, met (Ohio County Commissioner) Zach Abraham and (U.S. Attorney) Bill Ihlenfeld down there, in the same class I was, so it clearly had an impact."
Elliott said he feels civics should be a larger part of a student's education, and that Boys State goes a long way to shoring up knowledge of local politics.
"If I were designing school curriculums, I would probably make civics as important as math," he said. "In our country right now, we're so divided, I think we really need to have a better appreciation for civics. Politics has a bad name, but politics is the art of making democracy work. If you don't have a functioning political system, it's really hard to have a government that solves problems.
"This is a great opportunity for them to really get a first-hand taste of politics, which I know has a dirty name, but that's what makes everything work here."