E-Mail This Article to a Friend CAMPAIGN SNAPSHOT Megan Foster hits the streets BY CAMILLE DODERO

TWO HOURS BEFORE the Red Sox took the field at Yankee Stadium for game one of the playoffs, Megan Foster considered going home. It was around 6:15 on a Wednesday night, and the 20-year-old candidate for Somerville School Committee Ward Five had been knocking on doors for an hour and a half. Although another half-hour or so of daylight still remained, Foster and her campaign manager/boyfriend/navigator/wingman, Jason Costa, had exhausted their pre-mapped, three-street course of registered voters who hadn’t answered the door the first time they’d gone house-hopping before the preliminary election. But even though Foster felt weary after traipsing around the neighborhood and attending daytime classes at Emerson College, where she’s a commuter student majoring in political communication, she opted to continue ringing doorbells. One more side of one more street — the even numbers along Highland Road — before dusk fell. "That’s why she did so well in the election," Costa says. "When we wanted to go home, we didn’t."

Foster did do well in the preliminaries. Amazingly well. Blond, tall, and cheerful with a warm smile, she crushed the other two competitors vying for the seat of incumbent Kate Murray, who is not running for re-election — Janine Weston Lotti, a mother and Somerville High graduate; and Kevin Oliver, an administrator within the Swampscott Public School system — earning 845 votes, more than 50 percent of Ward Five’s 1600-plus votes. Was Foster surprised she placed so well, especially since she’s a college student? "Yeah," she says reflexively. "I’m still shocked. I must’ve done something right."

What she did right was work tirelessly, be young, and act eager. Foster and Costa (they joke that they’d make ideal running mates) spent five or six days a week, starting at the tail end of the summer, hitting every home of every single registered voter in Ward Five. When it got close to the September 23 election and lots of addresses hadn’t been visited, they worked an entire Saturday to finish the list before the election. Costa would hold the registered-voter catalogue on a clipboard, divided by street addresses, and guide his girlfriend from residence to residence, waiting on the curb while she ascended the stairs. He’d whisper the tenants’ last names so she could discern whether the people still lived there and then call them by name if they answered the door. If someone did answer, she’d introduce herself sweetly, offer her palm placard featuring her picture and résumé, and ask if they had any questions. Most didn’t. But every once in a while, someone would look at her age suspiciously. One older man actually brushed away her literature and said she was too young. Others tried to grill her on tough issues like school vouchers. "I try to be nice and still say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be dealing with that,’" she says. "But it’s someone’s concern, so you want to listen." And she’s not afraid to admit when she doesn’t know an answer. "I’m comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know, but I can get back to you.’"

Boy-next-door handsome with a groomed goatee, baggy jeans, and bright white sneakers, Costa kids that he "almost had a heart attack" when his girlfriend of two-plus years announced that she wanted to run for the school committee. He knew what kind of effort it takes to get someone into office: he campaigned for Somerville mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay. A Somerville Housing Authority employee, he says his friends don’t really understand his commitment to campaigning and that he’s really frustrated that he can’t even vote for Foster, since he lives in another Somerville ward. But for the most part, he’s content in his supporting capacity. "I’m the boyfriend, so that’s my duty," he jokes. He pauses and then defends his role. "She’s coming down the stairs, and I’m already telling her where to go next. If she tried to do this alone, she wouldn’t have been able to hit all these houses by herself."

As for Foster, a Somerville Pride Basketball coach and former high-school basketball player, how’d she get interested in city politics? When she was a senior at Somerville High, she acted as the student representative to the school committee, a position that entailed popping into weekly meetings and updating the board about things like midterms. "I don’t know if I’d call it fun, but it’s different and interesting," she says. The "major accomplishment" of her term was fixing the pay phones in the hallway beside the high-school gymnasium. "If there was, like, practices going on at the gym after school or during the games, no one could call home for a ride," she explains. "You had to go outside to the street, down a ways. So I said, ‘It’s a problem, a danger, when it’s late at night and you want to go home, you have to walk outside by yourself to use the pay phone.’" And they got the phones fixed.

But local politics are also in her blood. Her father ran for Somerville alderman a few years ago, and her aunt also ran for school committee — but both lost. "When I was younger, I hated politics," she admits. "I hated holding signs, I wasn’t into it, I didn’t understand it. But as you grow older, you appreciate it." And she says she’d rather be active in Somerville politics than at Emerson because "Emerson is more like school to me. And the [Somerville] school committee was more important to me than running for alderman because I know about the schools. I care more about them than I do about taxes, because I’m not a taxpayer yet. My brothers and sisters are still [in Somerville Public Schools] and my mother is an aide in one of the preschool classrooms."

Although it’s possible Foster might be the first winner of political office in her family, she’s not getting ahead of herself. "There’s still a lot of work to do," she says. So that’s why on a Wednesday afternoon in October, Foster chooses to continue door-knocking instead of heading home. As she and Costa finish up the last leg of their evening hike, they walk past rows of triple-deckers and step over smeared chalk drawings on the sidewalk. Many people aren’t home; some simply thank her for stopping by. But at the very last house she hits that night, her reputation as a college-kid-turned-local-pol precedes her, and the flushed woman behind the door invites her inside to talk.

"She said she’d read about me in the Somerville Journal," Foster says excitedly, running outside after their conversation. "She said she’d vote for me in November! See, it was a good idea to stay out."