Thursday, December 8, 2011 - The Peace Table at Bowie High School
Hi, all,
On Thursday, Tami, George and I tabled at Bowie HS and had perhaps our best day there ever. Bowie is either the first or second largest school in our district. George is a member of Veterans for Peace visiting Austin from Canada, and it was great to have him joining us. Tami was getting over a bug, and because we were busy, it was especially good to have three of us at the table.
Photos are posted at: http://peaceoptions.blogspot.com/
Here are George’s observations about our day, and then mine. From George: Following is a reflection on our time at Bowie High School on Dec 8. We were greeted at the school office and asked to check in and if we had checked with the school scheduler before hand. Bowie is where, on a previous occasion, Sustainable Options for Youth, then called Non-Military Options for Youth ,was told to leave the premises until the Principal had a chance to review and read the literature on our table. This in spite of the fact that the Austin Independent School Board had cleared our group to visit Austin high schools years ago. This was our third visit there since being asked to leave. My reflection is that it was a very postive experience for me, interacting with hundreds of high schoolers at the two tables we had set up in front of the school cafeteria for the two lunch periods. My guess is that no fewer than 300 students stopped at the table to play the Peace wheel game, make folders with stencils or pick up peace literature and brochures on the table. I personally got into about a dozen more in depth conversations with individual students.
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A National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy
Wednesday, 07 December 2011 06:14
December 6, 2011
David Swanson -
Please take some time to look through the new website of the new National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy: www.studentprivacy.org
I've just joined the board because I believe a great deal of good can be done.
The National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy is a one-trick pony and that trick is the ASVAB Campaign. In short, we call for the universal selection of Option 8 for students taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB in high schools across the country, thereby prohibiting the automatic release of test data to military recruiting services.
Sounds pretty obscure and technical, I suppose. But this is a relatively easy and proven model of denying the U.S. military what it needs in order to kill our young people by using them to kill others. Namely, it denies the military the illegal right to violate the privacy of our young people in furthering its recruitment efforts.
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The invasion of student privacy associated with military testing in U.S. high schools has been well documented by mainstream media sources, like 
NNOMY is a national network that serves to unite national, regional and local organizations that oppose the growing intrusion of the military in young people's lives. We seek to promote the importance of counter-recruitment organizing. NNOMY is not intended to function as an independent national organization, but rather as a coalition that strengthens the work of participating groups.
"In Europe, and to some degree on a global level, there are presently two trends which both contribute to an increased militarisation of youth. The first is the end (or, more exactly, the suspension) of conscription in most European countries. The second is an increasing “normalisation of war” stemming from the 'war on terror and the use of military force as a means of politics. Both trends reinforce each other in strengthening the militarisation of youth from an early age- something we are committed to working against.”
