Skipping School for Live Civics Lesson

"I really wanted to go" to the inauguration, said Myles Ambrose, 13, who started an online group to say so. (By James M. Thresher for The Post)

"It's a really big step forward in our society, and I really want to witness that," Myles said. "It's change from what we've had in the past. It's someone younger, or youngish. It's someone closer to understanding issues that affect me."

His 14-year-old friend Emma Chessen was so involved in the campaign, knocking on doors for Obama and holding an election night party with sparkling cider, that her parents decided to give up coveted inauguration tickets to stand with their children in the crowd.

"If my kids didn't care, if this hadn't been as important to them as it was, I would say, 'Oh, you guys watch it on TV,' " Sonia Chessen of Chevy Chase said. But the election changed her family's dinner conversations, she said, and she knew her children wouldn't be satisfied watching the inauguration from afar.

"I'm so devoted I would walk there, like, five miles," Emma said. "I just want to be there."

Tanuj Parikh, 21, a senior at Harvard who interned for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in 2006, said his loyalty to Obama solidified at a rally in Boston before the 2008 Massachusetts presidential primary.

"For the first time in my life, I understood the reverence and the awe they spoke of with JFK," he said, referring to former president John F. Kennedy.

Parikh bought a plane ticket to Washington for Jan. 19, but he said he paid extra for flight insurance in case he has to cancel. Like 2,000 other Harvard undergraduates, Parikh has a final exam scheduled during the inauguration. If the school doesn't respond favorably to the online petition he started, which has drawn about 600 signatures, he doesn't know what he's going to do, he said.

"The last thing I want is to not graduate in June," Parikh said. On the other hand, if he comes to Washington, he will have a story to tell any potential employer who asks about his failed class. "If they're are not going to hire me for that, I don't want to work there anyway," he said.

Robert Mitchell, spokesman for Harvard College, the undergraduate section of the university, said that the school's policy is not to move exams on a wholesale basis but that students can request accommodations through an administrative board, which will decide case by case.

Sophomore Jason Y. Shah, 19, called it a "backwards policy" for an "institution that is considered one of the most pioneering and forward-thinking in the world." Shah has petitioned for a religious exemption, one that coincidentally falls during the inauguration and would allow him to reschedule exams and travel to the District by bus. But he said others are left weighing the risks of going versus the disappointment of staying.

"Some students have said they are just going to go regardless," he said. "They are going to go and deal with the consequences afterward."

After all, as Montgomery 11th-grader Annika Glennon put it: "What are you going to tell your kids or your friends when they ask what you were doing on Inauguration Day.

"Like, 'Taking an exam?' " the 16-year-old said. "That's not cool."