Student story-Camp campaigns take to the Web and sidewalk

By Rebekah Burrow

Posters.

Buttons.

Fliers.

These are what people associate with elections. Elections for important matters like who will be the next president of the United States. Homecoming queen.

This was not the way people campaigned for king and queen of Flint Hills Publication Workshop. Instead, some used Twitter and shamelessly promoted with tweets. Others took to the sidewalk with chalk and wrote slogans leading from the campus to the hotel.

Advance Writing students, used chalk drawings to promote their candidates. With orange, green, purple, pink, yellow and white chalk, they wrote slogans like “Nikki+Chin=Utopia” and “Nikki and Chin are a perfect 10.” These were just two of the dozen’s of slogans adorning the ground.

Junior Carly Blaufuss and senior Feilisha Kutilike, both from Newton High School, dominated Twitter to promote their Newspaper Writing/Design class’ candidate for king.

They said that they used tweets to campaign because everyone at camp would see it if they used Twitter. Their goal, besides getting Matt to win, was to fill up the whole Twitter page with their slogans. They also entertained themselves taking lines from songs and changing them into slogans.

Some of those read, “Put your hands in the ayer for Matt Henton!!” (Inspired by “In the Ayer” by Flo Rider) and “There's only 2 types of people in the world...the ones that vote for Matt Henton, and those that don't” (a takeoff on “Circus” by Britney Spears).

Unfortunately, all this campaigning didn’t bring victory for any of the candidates. The winners came from Kapaun Mt. Carmel — a well-represented school. They were junior Tom Wittler and senior Erika Reals.

”Even though we lost,” Blaufuss said, “it brought the day to life.”

Rebekah Burrow is a student at Notre Dame de Sion and a student in the advanced writing class at the Flint Hills Publication Workshop.