For the third year in a row, a student from Charleston's George Washington High is headed to Washington, D.C., as part of the elite United States Senate Youth Program - this time, accompanied by a student from Spring Mills High in the Eastern Panhandle.
Arka Gupta, 18, is George Washington's student body president and second in his senior class - counselor Kackie Eller said his grade point average is .0002 behind that of his twin brother, Drew Gupta, who said he's got a weighted 4.8 average. That feat required straight-A's plus taking Advanced Placement courses that are worth extra credit.
"He took one more class," Arka Gupta said of his brother.
Gupta, along with Spring Mills senior Adrien Inman, an 18-year-old Eagle Scout who's also captain of his varsity soccer team, are the two West Virginia students state Schools Superintendent Michael Martirano chose for the program, which will provide the winners $5,000 scholarships and send them to Washington for a week in March to meet a U.S. Supreme Court justice, U.S. senators and other high-ranking officials, likely including the president.
Rayne Guilford, the program's director, said Friday she couldn't yet name the justice because of security issues and the fact the agenda could still change. She did say she expects President Obama will meet with the students, as he has in all previous years of his presidency.
Each year, only 104 high schoolers nationwide are selected for the program, which is sponsored by the Hearst Foundations in conjunction with the U.S. Senate, state education departments and the federal Defense Department. Two students are chosen from every state and two more each from D.C. and the overseas Defense Department-run schools for the children of active military members and defense personnel. All students applying were required to be serving in an elected or appointed student leadership position. Those selected also generally rank academically among the top 1 percent in their states and are involved in extracurricular activities such as debate club, athletics and the model United Nations.
"Coming from a lineage of diplomacy and civil service, I knew that this kind of opportunity was sort of my calling," Gupta said.
His grandfather was a diplomat in India, and his father, Rahul Gupta, is commissioner of West Virginia's Bureau for Public Health and led the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department during its response to the January 2014 Elk River chemical spill that contaminated the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of West Virginians.
Before becoming student body president this year, Gupta said he was also president of his junior class and vice president of both his sophomore and freshman classes. Since sixth grade, he's been in Junior Civitan, the youth portion of the Civitan International community service organization, which has a special emphasis on treating developmental disabilities. Other Junior Civitans have elected him governor of the Civitan district representing all of West Virginia and Ohio.
He also said he won Legislator of the Year and was elected Speaker of the House at the American Legion Mountaineer Boys State, a week long mock government experience for high school juniors. This year he was a captain and "academic officer" in the military aligned Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, where he helped other student cadets through tutoring and providing them access to resources that would help them in the classroom. Gupta also said he's interned since his freshman year with the state public defender's office, where he has observed trials and developed a resource guide for things like housing and food benefits that the public defenders could distribute to their clients.
He said he doesn't know where he wants to go to college and has a mix of career interests in areas like public health, law and government. He's interested in doing international legal aid before returning to West Virginia as a public defender and eventually running for the state Supreme Court.
"I think what I'm really going to aim for is to help disadvantaged populations and basically make sure everybody has equal opportunities for success," Gupta said.
Alongside soccer, Inman, the Spring Mills senior, also swims, runs track and participates in show choir and the National Honor Society. He wants to eventually become the ambassador to China.
He said he spent seven weeks during the summer as a Chinese exchange student, and if he doesn't get into the highly selective U.S. Naval Academy - two of his brothers are in the military - he'd like to go back to China to become fluent in the language. He said he's excited to meet a yet-unnamed ambassador from another country on the Washington trip, alongside the president and Supreme Court justice.
"It's really interesting to get the opportunity to learn and to really familiarize myself with our government and with another country's government," Inman said.
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