EASTHAM — Ten Nauset Regional High School juniors spent the last week of school building a whole new government from the ground up.
We were among a few hundred students from across Massachusetts at Stonehill College in Easton at Girls State and Boys State, learning from legislators, journalists, and activists about local government. The experience brought home the fact that we might in the not-too-distant future find ourselves or our peers are to be the ones in these positions.
These programs were founded by the American Legion, Boys State first in 1935 and Girls State in 1937, “to counter the socialism-inspired Young Pioneer Camps,” according to the Legion’s website. Despite those roots, today’s programs are conducted without a partisan purpose.
Going to Girls or Boys State is like a crash course in how government works. There are law, economy, and government electives and minicourses; participants volunteer for jobs that feel very real, serving on select boards and in courts. They run for offices including state representative and the constitutional “big six” positions of auditor, treasurer, secretary of state, attorney general, lieutenant governor, and governor.
To mimic America’s two-party system, participants are assigned randomly to two imaginary parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, which hold caucuses and conventions to draft their platforms. Candidates are chosen in primaries.
This year, at the center of the election commotion was an overwhelming desire to extend our collaborative way of getting things done beyond Stonehill College and into the real world. We all, boys and girls, talked a lot about whether we could shift the culture we live in every day to include healthy discussions about politics.
The Nauset students who attended — Emily Carr, Lucy Keigans, Charlie Leighton, William Murphy, Hero Peoples, Liv Prince, Isiah Robinson, Thomas White, Alyia Vasquez, and I — were selected for the program by history department head Andrew Clark. Participation is free, sponsored by the school, the Cape Cod Foundation, and the American Legion in Eastham.
Girls Staters worked in advance on six student-written bills. One required that all public buildings have free feminine hygiene products in women’s bathrooms; another mandated that doctors’ offices provide free contraceptives. There was a bill calling for a 6-percent transfer tax on houses over a million dollars to be spent on affordable housing, and a bill requiring people between 18 and 29 to complete 18,000 hours of community service. One law called for AI to block obscene content on social media; another mandated background checks before purchasing a pet.
Girls Staters voiced their opinions and proposed amendments during the party conventions. Then they were voted on by the representatives from each of our “towns.” The process was not unlike the one described by the state representatives who spoke to us, Alice Peisch, Kathy LaNatra, and Sam Montaño.
There was a lot of collaboration between the opposing parties. We passed three of the six bills, with amendments: the one on feminine hygiene products, the one on contraceptives, and the one on affordable housing.
“If you’re thinking about running for office, just do it,” the counselors told us. The campaigns turned out to be empowering for both winners and losers.
Liv Prince, who lives in Orleans, ran an unsuccessful campaign for Girls State attorney general. She won her county caucus but lost her party’s primary. Still, she said the experience didn’t dampen her enthusiasm. “It wasn’t nearly as scary as I was expecting,” she said.
Running meant writing speeches, advertising, networking, focusing on one’s core beliefs, and thinking about benefits to the whole community. That immersion was different even from the advanced placement classes in U.S. government and politics that almost every Nauset student in my class took sophomore year and loved.
“I got a much better sense not only of how it works but how accessible participation is,” said Prince. “It gave me a feeling that anyone can run for office and make a difference in the community.”
Boys State had a voting preregistration booth. Those who signed up will be able to vote as soon as they turn 18. That wasn’t offered to the girls, but everyone was eager to enter the voting world and to uphold the principles of “community, justice, freedom, and democracy.”
“I may forget some things,” said Prince, “but I’ll always remember the sense of community and understanding how to work as a team.”
Wellfleet’s Thomas White agreed. Besides finding a best friend whom he would not have met otherwise, White said Boys State changed his sense of how to make a difference.
“I would say that I am politically involved, and I keep up with all the news,” he said, “but this microcosm of government inspired me to become politically active. I spoke up in our municipal meetings and during party caucuses. Public speaking may seem daunting, but stand up and make yourself heard.”
Prince said that finding ways to compromise when there was disagreement “genuinely gave me hope for the future of this country.”
If most of us were feeling dissatisfied with the current state of American politics, despondent over gridlock, polarization, the presidential candidates, or dark money, we came away with a glimmer of hope, at least for Massachusetts.
Watching the June 27 “debate” between the two presumptive presidential candidates was “like a joke for both parties,” said White. But it didn’t change what he came home from Boys State thinking: “While it isn’t really evident in society nowadays, there are still young people who care about the government and how it operates and who would like to have a voice in their government in the future.”
The mantra at Girls and Boys State is “What you put into your community is what you will get out of it.” We all proved ourselves willing to put in quite a lot.
Olivia Bryant will be a senior at Nauset Regional High School in the fall. She lives in Orleans.
