NILES — Local candidates went back to school Wednesday. People running for a variety of offices converged on Brandywine High School in Niles to talk with students.

The forum was organized by Brandywine civics teacher Dave Roeder. He said he wanted to do something fun and relevant for the kids.

It was something different — for the students and the politicians. The students got to hear from real candidates who are running for real offices. No textbook theories today.

The politicians got a lesson on tweaking their messages for a younger audience. Gone, for a time, were grownup terms, such as taxes and oil drilling. They were replaced with words like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. It was sort of a collision between two worlds.

Some of the students are old enough to cast ballots in November. The candidates asked for their votes.

Others won’t be old enough to vote for years; they were asked to just get involved.

Students learned a variety of lessons.

“That government has enough money and that taxes can be lowered and don’t need to be raised, which I guess would make sense,” junior Dan Blank said.

"If students are only getting paid $7.15 an hour and you work only four hours, three fourths of your money is gone in gas,” said junior Kaley Jones.

Some students said that the computer talk was a good strategy.

“Oh yeah, that's going to work big time because half the kids in the world, in Michigan, they're going to be on the Internet, surfing the Net for all that kind of stuff,” said junior Kyle King.

“I think it did [work],” said senior Ambrosia Neldon. “It got a lot more people interested, that they were on our level."

Of course the forum affected different people in different ways. When one young man was asked what he got out of the forum, he replied that he got out of English class.