After receiving the title of Boys and Girls Club’s Manhattan Youth of the Year in December, senior Peyton Peterson competed at the state level in Topeka last Tuesday.

For the competition, Peterson was tasked with writing three essays and giving a speech to government representatives.

“[The speech] was about how the Boys and Girls Club impacted my life, and since I’ve been with them 12 years, they’ve had a pretty big impact in mine. They were there for me when no one else was, and during the best and worst moments of my life they were always there for me. So they’ve always been second family,” Peterson said.

“They were able to teach me the values of education, so not only was I able to start valuing school a lot more, I was able to become more social, because back then I was even more pertinent,” he said. “I was excited [to make state] because it was the first time I had actually worked hard for something. So it was nice to see that I was actually doing something good. That was my attempt to try to pay back the Boys and Girls Club for everything that they had done for me.”

At the state level, competitors gave a prepared speech before receiving an interview and critiques from judges. Next, they gave their speeches again, this time in front of a slightly larger audience, and judges determined their winner. Lastly, all competitors spoke for a third time, now in front of an even larger audience with government officials and Boys and Girls Club board members, before the winner was announced. Peterson took second place, receiving nothing, where the winner received a $5,000 scholarship and moved on to regionals in Dallas.

“The way the judges described it during the criticisms that my essays were well-written and that my attire was on point and that my speech was good, and I just needed to project more,” Peterson said. “So they gave me a lot of confidence, and then when you hear the other girl’s speech that won, it wasn’t bad, but it could’ve been better. So I was just wondering why because they did it on a point system for three columns: your essays, your speech, and then your attire and at five points each. So, somehow I did something that was enough to make me lose.”

Though bitter about his loss, competing wasn’t for nothing.

“There was a silver lining or two to [losing], so that was good,” Peterson said. “One of the judges was a member of DCF (Department for Children and Families), and what I was telling her was my passion for politics and the fact that I was in foster care. She offered me her card and things of that nature, so that way I could help her improve the foster care system, if that’s even possible, and to get me in contact with legislators.”