Sam Diener -

JROTC, a high school program to militarize youth in high schools, has already invaded almost 3400 schools. Peacework has learned that Congress passed a little-noticed measure in the 2009 National Defense Authorization bill to expand the number of JROTC schools to 3700 schools by 2020. To do this, the military will have to open at least 45 new JROTC units per year (Some schools drop the program each year, most often because of low student participation rates. In 2006, for example, Santa Barbara high school dropped its JROTC program due to high costs and low participation rates. Veterans for Peace members helped create a Peace Academy in its place.)

J

June 30 2009 / BBVM / Truthout - For the past four years, I have observed the military occupation of the high school where I teach science. Currently, Chicago’s Nicholas Senn High School houses Rickover Naval Academy (RNA). I use the term “occupation” because part of our building was taken away despite student,parent, teacher and community opposition to RNA’s opening.

Senn students are made to feel like second-class citizens inside their own school, due to inequalities. The facilities and resources are better on the RNA side. RNA students are allowed to walk on the Senn side, while Senn students cannot walk on the RNA side. RNA “disenrolls” students and we accept those students who get kicked out if they live within our attendance boundaries. This practice is against Chicago policy, but goes unchecked. All of these things maintain a two-tiered system within the same school building.

This phenomenon is not restricted to Senn. Chicago has more military academies and more students in Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps than any other city in the US. As the tentacles of school militarization reach beyond Chicago, the process used in this city seems to serve as a model of expansion. There was a Marine Academy planned for Georgia’s Dekalb County, which includes 10 percent of Atlanta. Fortunately, due to protest, the school has been postponed until 2010. Despite it being postponed, it is still useful to analyze the rhetoric used to rationalize the Marine Academy. Many of the lies and excuses used to justify school militarization in Chicago and Georgia may well be used in other cities as militarism grows.

  español -

May 9, 2009 / Tamar Lewin / MIAMI / New York Times - Every morning before school starts, Miles Woolley, a drafting teacher at Southwest Miami High School, gets a reminder of military life when the Junior R.O.T.C. honor guard marches by his classroom.

“Their marching and parading around in uniforms stirs bad memories in me,” he said.

Mr. Woolley, 61, is a Vietnam veteran whose service left him with a bullet in his head, a mostly useless left hand and a dragging left foot. He was drafted at age 19, not much older than his students are now, and transformed from a small-town newlywed into a fast-shooting reconnaissance soldier.

The prospect that his students might follow that path haunts him.

Southwest Miami High is a sprawling but orderly place that offers a wide range of classes, including cosmetology, auto shop and Advanced Placement calculus, to 2,800 students, most of whom are Hispanic and from low-income families.

Like many such high schools, it is also a focus for military recruiting. Hundreds of students take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or Asvab, test each year. More than 100 are enrolled in the Army J.R.O.T.C., drilling, marching and using dummy guns. And every Tuesday and Wednesday, recruiters from the Army, Navy and Marines set up tables in the lobby outside the cafeteria, handing out water bottles, key chains and stickers and talking up the benefits of a military career.

October 28, 2008  / Marc Norton / BeyondChron -  “Without JROTC, I would not be where I am today: a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army.” So writes Jason, a former JROTC cadet, in a recent Facebook post on the Keep JROTC Alive in San Francisco site. “As a young teenager,” he continues, “the JROTC program helped me develop discipline, leadership skills, and values which I continue to use today. So let’s keep the JROTC program alive!”

The Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) was created 90 years ago, at the height of the hysteria of World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson needed troops for the “war to end all wars.” The program was reauthorized in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson, who needed troops for yet another doomed military adventure, this time in the jungles of Vietnam. Today, under the reign of yet another wartime President, JROTC’s operational budget has more than doubled.

JROTC was, is, and always will be, a military recruitment program. The “discipline, leadership skills, and values” that Jason and other JROTC advocates tirelessly praise are, for many, nothing more than a come-on for recruitment.

  español  -

Oct. 22, 2008 / Javier C. Hernández / New York Times - Barbara G. Harris, 72, looked her troops in the eye. Staring out at mohawks on one side of the room, salt-white bobs on the other, she said in her delicately firm way: “Hold your ground. You have every right to stand there, and if anyone tells you differently, tell them your rights.”

A retired teacher and longtime peace advocate, Ms. Harris was tutoring 20 new enlistees in the art of “counter-recruitment,” her personal crusade to block recruiters for the United States military from contacting New York City high school students.

She had assembled the group in her war room, a space near Union Square lent by a sympathetic organization, where plants and antiwar signs line the walls, in preparation for a blitz Thursday evening at parent-teacher conferences, where Ms. Harris and the others plan to stand on sidewalks outside school buildings armed with opt-out forms and their best sales pitches.

“You don’t have a whole lot of time — that’s the point,” Ms. Harris told the volunteers, who ranged in age from college students to the Granny Peace Brigade, a New York group of older women started in 2005 to protest the Iraq war. “Don’t be frustrated by that. They do stop.”