Girls State reps Farrow, Armbrust visit Post 457, share experiences with Legion members

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Every sum­mer, mem­bers of the Sunbury’s Col. Ben­son W. Hough Amer­i­can Legion Post 457 spon­sors sev­eral stu­dents who attend Buck­eye Boys State and Buck­eye Girls State. Last Thurs­day evening, two girls who attended Buck­eye Girls State stopped at the Legion Post to share their expe­ri­ences with Post 457 members.

Esther Arm­brust is between her junior and senior year. She’s a home-schooled stu­dent who also attends Big Wal­nut High School.

Arm­brust said she first heard about Buck­eye Girls State from Post 457 mem­ber Roy Mer­chant, and her four older sib­lings also attended either boys or girls state.

“I was excited about the oppor­tu­nity,” Arm­brust said. “I got involved with Teen­Pact, was elected as a sen­a­tor there, and got excited about gov­ern­ment. I learned that we do have a voice in how our gov­ern­ment is run.”

Arm­brust said while at Buck­eye Girls State, held this year at the Uni­ver­sity of Mount Union in Alliance, she became the admin­is­tra­tive assis­tant to the governor.

“There were so many incred­i­ble girls, and I learned a lot,” Arm­brust said. “The one sig­nif­i­cant thing I learned about was cam­paign­ing — how to con­nect with peo­ple, and how to get peo­ple to listen.

“I’m not cer­tain of what I’d like to become,” Arm­brust con­tin­ued. “But I do know that I would like to bring our gov­ern­ment back to the Chris­t­ian val­ues it was founded on; and I know that I per­son­ally have a voice and my voice can be recognized.”

Arm­brust will attend the Teen­Pact Con­gress in August where she will serve as a Sen­a­tor. Dur­ing her senior year she will take col­lege courses as part of the Post Sec­ondary Option pro­gram, then take a year off fol­low­ing high school and par­tic­i­pate in a mission.

Rachel Far­row attends West­er­ville South High School. Far­row was a West­er­ville Amer­i­can Legion Buck­eye Girls State alter­nate, when Post 457 mem­bers stepped up to the plate and spon­sored her.

Far­row, who’s father attended Buck­eye Boys State, said she took gov­ern­ment dur­ing her junior year and found out that text­book gov­ern­ment is dif­fer­ent than gov­ern­ment in the real world.

“Things are com­pletely dif­fer­ent than what I’d learned in class,” Far­row said. “We focused on a lot more on cau­cus­ing. I met so many peo­ple from so many back­grounds. One friend was from a class of only 16 people.

“I loved this oppor­tu­nity and I’m very grate­ful to mem­bers of Post 457 for spon­sor­ing me,” she added.

Far­row, who plays lacrosse and is involved in the­atre at West­er­ville South, will spend her senior year study­ing in France and plans to pur­sue engi­neer­ing in college.

The Ohio Amer­i­can Legion Aux­il­iary has spon­sored Buck­eye Girls State for more than 60 years. This year over 900 girls from around the State of Ohio attended Buck­eye Girls State.

Buck­eye Girls State and Buck­eye Boys State appli­ca­tion forms are avail­able in the Big Wal­nut High School guid­ance office dur­ing Decem­ber and Jan­u­ary. Post 457 looks for stu­dents who are active; they don’t nec­es­sar­ily have to have be high grade point aver­age stu­dents, but stu­dents who are involved in their edu­ca­tion and par­tic­i­pate in extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties and out­side organizations.

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion about Buck­eye Girls State go to < buckeyegirlsstate.org >; for addi­tional infor­ma­tion about Sunbury’s Col. Ben­son W. Hough Amer­i­can Legion Post 457 go to < americanlegionsunbury.com >.

Posted by Gary Henery on Jul 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.