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Turnout was reportedly low in most Bay Area off-year elections on Tuesday, but at one Berkeley school, it came close to 100 percent. 

The City of Franklin Microsociety Magnet School held its third annual election of student candidates to the posts of mayor, vice mayor and treasurer – part of the school’s goal of creating a miniature real-world community, complete with businesses and public services. 

“From my perspective,” said Principal Barbara Penny-James, “it’s too late to suddenly figure these things out in high school.” 

On Tuesday morning, children filed down to the front hall with their classes and, fidgeting, circled their choices at cardboard booths before slipping the ballots into a plastic ballot box. Sixth-graders served as election monitors, giving instructions to tiny kindergartners, but sometimes needing guidance themselves.  

“You have to tell them what to do and try not to look at their ballots,” Addie Holsing, the magnet school’s curriculum coordinator, firmly told the sixth-graders as they tried to shepherd the squiggling groups of younger voters into line. 

Caleb Kleppner of the Center for Voting and Democracy, a San Francisco nonprofit that works to increase voter participation, spoke to each of the classes about how the process works. The children all registered to vote ahead of time, and the candidates “campaigned” by giving speeches at last Friday’s school “town hall” assembly. They also had campaign managers. 

“These guys are wicked spin doctors,” Kleppner said. 

“Our work is about making the elections system more fair and involving more people in it, and it’s good to start young,” he said.  

Fifth-grader Laron Stanten wouldn’t say who he voted for, but said he had made up his mind after the candidates gave their speeches. 

“When they gave the speech, one said they’d get better food in the cafeteria, and the other said they would get more balls out in the courtyard,” Stanten said. 

His classmate, Jonathan Ponder, said: “I wanted honesty – they didn’t just make up lies to be elected.” 

“Sometimes they’re honest,” Stanten chimed in. “Sometimes.” 

City of Franklin recently won a second consecutive federal Magnet Schools grant, which allows it to continue a civics project that grounds its curriculum in the practical matters of adult life.  

Students are “sworn in” as Franklin citizens at the beginning of the school year. In field trips to the Berkeley City Council and mayor’s office, they have learned first-hand how a city is run. They create resumes and cover letters, buy products from each other with in-school currency (students’ own pictures grace the bills), and run a city council with representatives from each classroom. 

“It looks just like a group of adults,” said Irving Phillips, the district’s magnet schools program coordinator. “They’re talking about the same things.” 

The grant extension will allow the school to add a seventh grade next year, and an eighth grade the year after that, said Addie Holsing, the school’s curriculum coordinator. 

Holsing, a 40-year veteran of the Berkeley schools, said City of Franklin’s approach is partly rooted in education research showing a connection between brain development and the ability of children to integrate what they learn with real-life situations. 

“If there’s an articulated connection between the things they do, the learning goes up,” she said. “If you reflect on the strategies that you just used to successfully complete something, the brain reinforces it in the long-term memory.” 

After the November 2000 election, said Phillips, City of Franklin students “could not understand how a group of kids could run an election fair and square (but) the national government would mess up on counting their ballots and there would be a controversy over who got elected president.” 

Kleppner said the school’s experiment in putting children through a full-fledged version of the adult ritual of voting was “radical” considering future voting habits among children are normally most strongly influenced by whether their parents vote. 

“It shouldn’t be radical; it should be a given,” he said. “Every kid in our school system should learn about being an active member of society.” 

The winners were announced over the school loudspeakers at 12:40 p.m., the end of Tuesday’s abbreviated school day, with parents eagerly awaiting the news in the front office. Erin Williams, grade 6, will be sworn in as the new mayor in January. Jhamaria McCreary, grade 5, will be the new vice mayor and Elizabeth Smith, grade 4, the new treasurer. 

Marissa Saunders, the educational chair of the League of Women Voters’ Berkeley-Albany-Emeryville chapter and mother of Jhamaria McCreary, said her daughter had been awake all night with excitement. She was ready whether she won or lost, Saunders said. 

“She said she would be a little sad” if she didn’t get the office, “but that it would be okay.”