Age Is Just a Number

"Alex was very committed to youth rights even back in high school," says Halbert, 27, who lives in Fenton, Mich., and is head cook at a Ruby Tuesday. "Young people need a voice."

The next summer, Koroknay-Palicz discovered the National Youth Rights Association, which at the time was just a Web site run by a handful of young people. In 1999 he moved to Washington to attend American University, and in 2000 he became executive director of NYRA. He left college after three years.

Since 2001, Koroknay-Palicz has lived in a group home in Rockville, just off Veirs Mill Road. He has a small room in the back of the house with a bed, a desk and a computer. On the walls, posters -- Spider-Man, scantily clad supermodel Ashley Richardson -- and photos of family and friends. His rent is $345 a month.

He drives a 1989 Grand Marquis. "It's the only car I have ever had, since I was 16," he says.

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Next year NYRA will celebrate its 10th anniversary. Today there are in various cities some 10 active chapters, "which come and go, depending on who graduates," Koroknay-Palicz says. He is excited about a new group at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He is the only full-time paid employee. The board is composed of nine young people, including several high school students.

The nonprofit organization, Koroknay-Palicz adds, had two main goals for this year: Find an office and somehow develop "more of a real-world presence."

Well, at least he found an office -- $500-a-month digs he rents from Common Cause. It's a tiny room, really, smaller than his Rockville bedroom, packed with two desks, three donated desktop computers and three chairs on the ninth floor of a 19th Street NW office building. There are no windows. Koroknay-Palicz shares the space with a parade of interns.

Posters on the wall include one for the National Youth Agency -- a lower-the-voting-age coalition in Great Britain, where the threshold is also 18. Koroknay-Palicz points out that several countries in the world, including Brazil and Nicaragua, allow citizens to vote at 16. Austria lowered its voting age to 16 this year.

On the bookshelves: "How Children Fail" by John Holt, "Birthrights" by Richard Evans Farson and "Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation" by Mike A. Males. These are bibles in the youth rights movement.

Males, a senior research fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, is given to observations such as this, from an e-mail to The Washington Post: "When a broad array of rights are denied to youths, important adult skills are not learned in adolescence. Adolescents must learn them on their own or arrive with little experience in adulthood, a period in which skills are harder to learn."