Dear Editor,

It is a new year and Carnie Welch American Legion Post 27 members are preparing for this year’s Oklahoma Boys State and Girls State events. Starting around Feb. 1, members of Post 27 will began contacting schools and previous sponsors, looking for new sponsors, and getting presentations ready for the events happening at the end of May.

Boys State and Girls State are basically weeklong events for 11th grade students. They will learn how state, county, and city governments work through not only classes but by running for and possibly being elected to positions in one or more levels of government. There are other learning events and some entertaining activities. By completing in these weeklong events, the students can earn college credits and become eligible for different scholarships. Each year there are two students from each state to attend Boys National and Girls National.

Some students and/or parents may have heard that students can register online. Registration can be done that way but to prevent your student or or family being charged for attending you need a code provided by us which will indicate we are the Post sending the student to the event and our Post will cover the expense of the event. We will require a deposit to ensure that the student will attend the full event. After the student has attended then we will return the deposit.

A number of attendees we have sent in the past have received substantial scholarships. One student was talking to someone offering scholarships but that person handling the scholarship didn’t seem as if the student had done much of anything to earn a large scholarship until the student mentioned about attending one of these events and being elected to an office. Now the student is attending college on a full scholarship for four years with follow up education being paid for. You may have read about this before last year’s events.

This is just one reason our Post and Auxiliary still work together to encourage students to attend Boys State and Girls State. A number of former attendees have gone on to run businesses, help in our communities, and strive to do more because of what they learned at the events and the long friendship they made. We will provide website addresses and Facebook pages for Oklahoma Boys State and Girls State on our Facebook page and when we visit with the students at the schools. Even students doing homeschooling through an accredited system can attend these events.

We are looking forward to meeting the students as well as those willing to help sponsor them.