Behind the Scenes of Boys State

On Thursday, June 8, two Girls State media representatives, Emily Day and Emily Oestmann, met up with two Boys State media representatives, Brent Lucke and Ethan Tylski, to discuss the differences between the two adjacent organizations.Because Boys and Girls State have limited interaction and little knowledge about each other, every year they try to arrange a meeting between the two.

Q: What are some of the activities Boys State has to offer?

Ethan: Ok, so we have volleyball, track - there’s actually a track [meet] going on right now, but we’re doing this instead.

Brent: Football, basketball, and newspaper… historian, band and choir.

Ethan: We do that about 3:00 every day until about 5:00.

Q: What personalities do you encounter on a day to day basis?
Ethan: There’s actually two types of people I’ve noticed. Outgoing people, sometimes outgoing to a fault and they’re the most social people you’ll ever meet. They’re campaigning, they’re talking to people, they’re going around and eating breakfast. I’ve had multiple times where somebody ate breakfast with me and it turns out this one guy, he was running for governor and I thought he was just there to talk to me the whole time. Then there were the quiet ones that were a little socially awkward-

Brent: But those were the ones that were actually know a lot too

Ethan: There’s also the few democrats-

Brent: Well there’s actually a lot more democrats…

Ethan: Yeah there’s a lot more than I thought there would be,

Brent: And then there’s a lot of third party people, more than anything

Ethan: Oh yeah, there’s a ton of Libertarians.

Q: Are there any floor rivalries? Or any favorite chants?

Ethan: A lot of people don’t like Belloid, because they won last year… I can’t even tell you why we don’t like them so much, it’s just that they won last year. Everyone just universally hates them

Brent: And then there’s one between Gettysburg and Yorktown… but it’s kind of like a joke, just because their chants are so loud.

Q: Were there any significant debates that went on this week around touchy subjects?

Brent: There was just one in the Legislature today over a proposed bill over reassuring public education. The debate was between the most informed and the most charismatic people in the room.

Ethan: There was a big debate on gun control. There was a lot of people that just wanted to lift all the restrictions on guns...so that was a big debate.

Brent: Farm subsidies were a big one, which was a huge debate.

Ethan: Healthcare was a big one...

Brent: The Ogallala Aquifer

Ethan: It’s pretty 50/50 on that issue. So obviously all the city folk were for it and all the farmers all the western people were against it of course, and the city people were more for it.

Q: What were the most popular campaign slogans?

Brent: A lot of alliteration with peoples’ names…

Ethan: We had one that was ‘Make Gettysburg Great Again’. There was was that was ‘Get Down with Downs’... his last name was Downs.

Q: What has Boys State offered you that you feel will impact you the greatest in the future?

Brent: Probably diving into the amount of debate between two people … like usually we think in the political field there’s a bunch of pro-life and pro-choice, but there’s a bunch of pro-life people that are like: How about these exceptions, and there was a debate there too.

Ethan: I think definitely there has been a real eye opener for me, at least, about the whole idea of compromise, like I was pretty staunch on quite a few issues. You can’t just always take these hardline stances. I wanted to come in and really reduce gun control for my party platform, but there were a lot of people who didn’t have that idea, so I ended up having to compromise on just about keeping regulations the same. We ended up giving more money to things like health insurance and education, which is fine, but it wasn’t one of the things that I thought I would have to compromise on.

Q: Do you have a lot of freetime throughout your day?

Brent: Not really.

Ethan: Almost none. We have about thirty minutes at the end of the day

Brent: And we can use that to get our article done for the newspaper, sometimes it’s forty-five minutes…

Ethan: Oh yea, at the end of the day though, we use that thirty to brush our teeth or shower or some people, they’re just hanging out

Brent: Other kids take showers in the morning too, it’s not just at night. But, yeah there’s never a block larger than forty-five minutes

Q: What does the outline of your day look like? Is it more structured, or does it change from a day to day basis?

Ethan: It’s completely structured, there is a 6:30 wake-up call, we get down to breakfast at around 6:50, and then at 7:50 we are always lining up for the flag raising...

Brent: Then usually we have a speaker.

Ethan: Then after that we go to lunch and then after that we have break-out sessions where we go and we have legislature, city, and educational board…

Brent: Then we go back to our activities, which can be sports

Ethan: But in our case it’s newspaper, then we go to dinner

Brent: Then it’s another speaker…

Ethan: and then discussion.

Q: Describe the citizen councilor relationship.

Brent: It depends from counselor to counselor, because there is always one that is like ‘one-of-the-guys’ and the other ones are…

Ethan: The Dads.

Brent: Yeah, the Dads, but joking dads

Q: How do you feel about the girls state dress code being stricter?
Brent: I think it’s kind of unfair, yours is more strict and ours is more lax. I personally think they should make ours stricter

Ethan: There are a lot of guys who say that it’s stupid, it’s kind of ridiculous how you guys have to dress up every day when all we have to do is come in our shorts. Like right now, you guys are dressed really nice and I mean, at least he wore jeans.

Q: How did campaigns go? How did your election process work out?

Brent: A lot of candidates, and state there was not enough people, but for the education board it was about what you would expect. But there were a lot of governors running and a lot of lieutenant governors.

Ethan: What we did is that, we selected each state official [candidate] in our cities, so when we went to the primary election, we would just have one candidate that our county was behind. We had one day where the candidates would just go around and campaign in PACs. That’s at least what we tried to do. Today we had the governors come in and tell us who they were, what they believed in and then we had a primary election.