In Wendell and Knightdale, candidates will make their pitches to voters in forums planned for both towns. The Knightdale mayoral candidates will go first with a forum scheduled for Tuesday night at town hall. That'll happen as the results from Tuesday's school board elections are becoming clear. On Thursday night, the candidates for office in Wendell will gather for a similar event at the Wendell Community Center.

The Knightdale town council candidates will take part in their own forum on Oct. 18.

The school board race is open to a relative handful of voters from eastern Wake County. Those folks, in Knightdale, will be asked to choose a candidate in the contest between incumbent Keith Sutton and Vernita Peyton. The race is open to those Knightdale voters for the first time this year because redistricting resulted in a sliver of Knightdale voters being carved into the school board's District 4. Sutton is part of the Democratic minority that is struggling to retake control of the board after two years of contentious debate over student reassignment.

And though Tuesday's election is open to only a small number of eastern Wake voters, the results will be felt all over Wake County. If Democrats regain control over the school board, that could signal a shift away from all the reassignment debate. If Republicans strengthen their grip on the school board, that will likely mean easier passage for reassignment measures and a host of other initiatives the Republican-led majority supports.

Elections are always exciting. Election Day seems almost like a holiday. People seem to be a bit more pleasant and those who vote regularly ask others if they've voted yet.

At 45, I've lost track of exactly how many elections I've voted in now, but I've managed to cast a ballot in every election for which I was eligible.

That track record is directly attributable to Reginald Hayes, my civics teacher at East Wake High School.

Papa Hayes, as he was called, had a gruff exterior, but as the semester wore on, he became much more friendly and grandfatherly. Some students, who had him more than once, knew he wasn't the curmudgeon he portrayed and I'm sure they looked forward to his class from Day 1. For others, like me, who only had him for one class, it took some time to get him to warm up.

One comment he made, though, struck me oddly at the time and has stuck with me ever since.

Mr. Hayes said giving 18-year-olds the right to vote was ridiculous because they wouldn't take advantage of it. I decided then and there that I would not prove him right.

I turned 18 in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan won his second term in office. Remembering Mr. Hayes' argument, you can bet I found time to vote. I was a freshman in college that year, but I drove home to Wendell from the N.C. State campus and went with my mother to vote.

Now, Mr. Hayes may not have believed what he told us that spring morning. He may have been using some reverse psychology to motivate someone to take part in the Democratic process. If that's what he was doing, it worked like a charm on me.

There's nothing better to encourage a certain behavior by teenagers than to tell them they can't do something. They'll break their neck to do it in spite of what any adult says.

In our upcoming local elections, turnout will likely be quite low. A few hundred people will decide the leadership for our towns and a few thousand will determine who leads our education system.

That's too bad. It only goes to prove that Mr. Hayes was right when he complained that people don't take advantage of rights they've been given.