Governor Jack Markell discusses the benefits that young leaders gain while participating in the Boys and Girls State Program. The weeklong conference, which is hosted at Legislative Hall in Dover, mimics the state legislature in an effort to engage students by showing the importance of politics and their role in the future.
Governor’s Weekly Message
Governor Jack Markell discusses the benefits that young leaders gain while participating in the Boys and Girls State Program.
Full text of Governor Jack Markell’s weekly message:
The most heated debates you’ll hear in Dover each year typically happen at the end of June – when time gets short, and the stakes get higher.
But the debaters aren’t always your State Senators or Representatives.
They’re high school students, part of the Boys and Girls State programs run by the Delaware American Legion.
These young people arrive in Dover one week each year to experience first-hand what government can and can’t do to help people.
They elect a Boys State and Girls State Governor and Lt. Governor, appoint a Cabinet, break into caucuses, elect leadership and create agendas they need to shape into legislation and pass into laws, all in the space of a week.
These young men and women get a lot out of the experience, out of the chance to watch and talk with elected officials that they’re shadowing,
But their presence each year gives us even more.
In part, because it’s great to know the issues these student leaders are debating
the need for more jobs, stronger schools, safer streets, and financially responsible governing–
the same issues on the minds and agendas of the legislators and public officials that their moms and dads elected to represent them.
But more importantly, with our legislative session drawing to its July 1st end, the presence of these young leaders throughout legislative hall serves as a living reminder that the decisions we make impact the future – their future.
And that issues that may divide us pale in comparison to what unites us – including a shared desire to give each of those young leaders, their younger brothers and sisters, and all the classmates they’ll tell about their experience – an assurance that the Delaware where they are growing up is as full of the promise and potential as the one we were lucky enough to grow up in ourselves.
Their presence, their passion for their own legislative debates, their hope and optimism that, working together, they can get something meaningful done is meaningful in itself– even if the laws they pass their one week in Dover only live on in their memories and the Girls and Boys State record books–
That spirit, that hope and that promise of Boys and Girls State can help inspire the work we do to make laws that last….
Reminding us that together, we need to keep Delaware moving forward.
