YOUNGSTOWN — City school students celebrated election day with a little democracy of their own.

On Tuesday, Chaney High School students held school elections and some even participated in the real thing. A bus took about a dozen registered voting-age students to their official polling places to cast their ballots for local, state and federal elections.

The whole project was organized by Assistant Principal Art Scissum, with the help of the school’s history teachers.

“Yesterday we had a new voter seminar, and had the teachers lay out the issues and the candidates and their platforms,” he said. “No bias, just giving the straight facts on the platforms the candidates are running on and explaining the issues.”

Scissum also made sure 18-year-old students got registered, got their ID’s or driver’s licenses, and did all the homework on those students’ voting precincts.

This is the second year Chaney has celebrated its “Day of Democracy,” and they’ve made improvements, Scissum said. They took the ballot directly from the Mahoning County Board of Elections, and added the school’s candidates for class president, vice president, treasurer and secretary.

“We showed them a ballot in advance, so they’re not overwhelmed when they vote,” he said. Just like a regular polling place, the students had to register at the front desk when they walked in to cast their votes.

The students registered to vote in Tuesday’s general election were treated to a breakfast provided by Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, an organization dedicated to teaching students the history of the Civil Rights movement through trips to the south.

“I feel like we should all do this because it’s a right we’ve been given and not everybody had this chance. If you look in the history books, a lot of people struggled to get the right to vote and we should be able to cherish that,” senior and first-time voter Katherine Abrego Portillo said.

She said she was moved during Sojourn’s most recent trip to Mississippi, where the students met the 99-year-old wife of Vernon Dahmer, a Civil Rights leader and the president of an NAACP chapter in Hattiesburg. Dahmer was killed when the KKK firebombed his home in January 1966 after he began offering to pay poll taxes for black voters.

Jasmine Cowan, another student involved with Sojourn, said she has been interested in learning about the candidates and issues and seeing who will benefit the most from each platform.

“Neither (presidential) candidate really totally aligns with my views, but one is definitely better than the other,” she said.

Cowan said she has enjoyed the debates.

“I enjoy watching and listening to what they say, and I hope that they will come through with the promises they make,” she said.