Director Gets Help From Kids
by About 225,000 school-age youths – including 125,000 from the Greene-Montgomery County area – will go to the polls Tuesday to "vote" alongside their parents as part of Kids Voting in Ohio.
The success of the statewide voter-education program depends upon the labor of more than 4,000 volunteers helping Susan Peterson Darcy, director of Kids Voting. But none is more important than the three who call her “Mom.” “When I took this job, Kids Voting was more meaningful to me because my kids were involved,” Darcy said in her office on the 12th floor of One Dayton Centre, overlooking Courthouse Square.
Darcy, 41, and her husband, Tim, have an adopted family that looks as all-American as democracy itself. Daughter Lauren, 14, is of Puerto Rican heritage; son Quinn, 12, is black; daughter Olivia, 9, is white.
“Some people don’t even ask us about it,” said Lauren, who goes to Meadowdale High School.
“Some people look at me and say, ‘Your mom is white,’ ” Quinn said. “I just say, ‘Yeah, but that’s my mom.’ We all work like a family.”
And they do work.
“We help Mom about two-thirds of the time,” Quinn said. “We pack stuff in envelopes. One night we did about 500 envelopes. It was a lot.”
Many 12-year-old boys would never confess that they spent an evening helping their mom. But this one said, “Actually she’s kind of fun. She’s funny and talkative.”
“They’re troupers,” Darcy said. “So long as we keep the tasks varied and short, they like it. I think they also like the big open space in my office, for turning cartwheels.”
While the attention is on thousands of children going to the polls, Darcy said she believes the real benefit of Kids Voting is the school-curriculum material.
“Everybody gets excited when they hear what the curriculum teaches the kids,” Darcy said. “It’s a very comprehensive program on consensus building, how to analyze sources of information, how to separate good from faulty information, how to look for leadership qualities, how to read and understand issues on the ballots.”
From a 9-year-old’s perspective, Olivia said she likes “to learn about the voting. And Mom got to meet (Ohio attorney general) Lee Fisher! And if Mom didn’t have the job, we couldn’t afford our minivan.”
Darcy came to Kids Voting Ohio last July from the Arthritis Foundation, where she’d been a program director for two years.
At home in Harrison Twp., she and her husband, a systems analyst, take turns getting up with the children at 5:55 a.m. On Tuesday, though, Darcy expects to be in her downtown office before 6 a.m. and does not expect to finish counting ballots until past midnight.
“Can I skip school to help you?” Quinn asked.
“Of course not,” Darcy replied.
“But we’re a team!” he protested, enjoying the lost cause.
“And who is the coach?” Darcy asked.
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