Patterson youth spends summer as Senate page

Parker Felterman got to spend his summer vacation on Capitol Hill, a way only few high school students get to experience.
Felterman, 16, of Patterson, served as a U.S. Senate page this summer with 46 other pages and was the only one from Louisiana.
From June 6 to Aug. 7, Felterman lived in Washington D.C., while working as a Senate page sponsored by U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge. Felterman contacted Cassidy’s office and his staff helped Felterman through the process of becoming a page, he said. Felterman was Cassidy’s first page since he entered the Senate in January.
He attended Berwick High School last school year and will begin attending the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts in Natchitoches as a high school junior Tuesday.
Felterman lived with some of the pages in a dorm about two blocks away from the Hart Senate Office Building next to the Capitol. All pages had to be either be an incoming high school junior or outgoing junior, he said.
There are three other sessions pages serve in including another summer session and fall and spring sessions, during which they actually go to school while they work, Felterman said.
Felterman enjoyed meeting the other pages from around the country, “who are definitely going places in life,” he said.
“One of our responsibilities was we had to know all 100 senators. We had to know what they looked like, and we had to know what state they were from,” Felterman said.
At the end of Felterman’s first week as a page, he had to take a test to determine his knowledge of the senators.
Any page who didn’t past the test couldn’t go onto the Senate floor until he or she retook the test and passed, he said.
“So that first week that was a big nail biter for a lot of pages,” Felterman said.
Pages served either early or late shifts, and spent most of their time at the rostrum in case a senator or anyone else needed something, he said.
Felterman stayed busy making runs to copy bills to distribute around the Capitol, he said.
“During a vote, if you’re not holding the door open for senators, you could also be down on the subway. There’s a subway that runs between the Capitol and the Senate office buildings. And you would have to keep a record of which senators came and went during the vote,” he said.
When a senator is preparing to speak, pages would have to “set them up,” which involved getting their preferred water, podium size and possibly an easel and staff chair for a presentation, he said.
Felterman’s favorite part of his page experience was seeing that U.S. Senators are people just like anyone else, he said.
“I’ve seen them when they’re off camera interacting with each other, interacting with me, interacting with staffers,” Felterman said.
“They have aspirations. They have personalities, some of them great personalities.”
A lot went on in the Senate during Felterman’s time on the floor.
“There was some turmoil. There was drama. It was like high school really,” he said.
Felterman had never been to Washington, D.C., before and the page program made sure all the pages got to go on lots of field trips to visit different sites, he said.
Felterman was “lucky enough” to be on the Senate floor when both Cassidy and Sen. David Vitter, R-Metairie, delivered speeches regarding the Lafayette shooting, he said.
“I actually wasn’t supposed to be on the floor at that time. It just sort of strangely worked out that way. It brought me to tears seeing these two men, especially Senator Cassidy ... I thought he was going to break down. It was one of the most touching things I saw over there,” he said.
Felterman chose to go to the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts for the same reason he went wanted to serve as a page to gain a “new experience,” he said.
Felterman said he has no clue what he wants to do with his life at this point.
He might want to serve in the Senate himself one day, but first he wants “to live a little,” he said.
“I’d give anything to go back,” he said of time in Washington, D.C.
“It was a great experience. Senator Cassidy offered me an internship, and I’d love to hit him up on that one day for sure when I’m in college probably.”

This story was written by Zachary Fitzgerald of The Daily Review staff. Reach him at zfitzgerald@daily-review.com.