Good for them

Friday, August 19, 2011

Three youngsters from Bedford recently attended Boys or Girls State, joining dozens of other high school students from around the state in a program sponsored by the American Legion and its Auxiliary.

The teens were Lainey Graham, a junior at BHS, who went to Girls State, and Erik Falkengren and Jared Hornsby, who went to Boys State.

We don’t hear much about this program, or at least we don’t hear as much about it as we ought to, but here’s a synopsis:

The kids establish a mythical 51st state, become educated in the American way of government, and then apply what they’ve learned by actually governing a city or town and working within political parties.

One can only hope – and, frankly, we assume – that they handled it better than our federal government handled the recent debt crisis.

At Girls State, Graham was elected town treasurer and a senator. At Boys State, Falkengren was elected executive councilor and Hornsby was elected town treasurer. They had to learn to work within a system, to deal with others, nearly all of them strangers, and what to do once they were elected.

The kids who go to Boys or Girls State are, potentially, our leaders of the future and this Legion-sponsored yearly event gives them a jump on understanding their responsibilities and how things work.

Too bad the Legion can’t get Congress into the program.