español -
May 25, 1991 / Colman McCarthy / The Washington Post - ERIE, PA. -- Of officials running the Erie School District, Laurie Quiggle had the most modest of requests in 1986. In the name of both free speech and broadening the education options of students, including her own five children, might she provide information to the town's four public high schools to counter the military's freewheeling access to the young? Why not literature on conscientious objection to draft registration and on nonmilitary career opportunities?
She received an emphatic no.
The denial in no way deterred Quiggle, a member of the Erie Peace Alliance who takes adult-ed courses at nearby Edinboro University. Among the runarounds school board officials subjected her to, Quiggle remembers an early one designed for her specifically: "They came up with a legalism stating that the only outsiders allowed into the high schools were 'bona fide employers or bona fide representatives of educational institutions who actually have jobs to offer or further educational opportunities to offer.' In other words, the military was welcomed but not me."
Instead of slinking off, Quiggle found a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union. She took the school board to court. In late April, the chief judge in Erie's U.S. District Court ruled in her favor. After years of waiting, she is now allowed to bring her information on peace education and conscientious objection to guidance counselors. She can also post it on school bulletin boards. Quiggle now enjoys what military recruiters have had all along: access to Erie's public high schools. Her victory assures diversity.
When the decision came down late last month, Quiggle had a few days of elation that were followed by realizing, with some wavering, the enormous challenge of gathering the most credible anti-war literature available; scheduling visits with guidance counselors, teachers, parents and students; and doing it all with no funds of her own and no assistants. Quiggle, who is 38 and has children ranging from 6 to 15, vows to find a way.
The Erie court decision is the latest in a series of rulings against closed-minded school boards that resist even minor efforts of peace groups seeking educational choice. In 1989, a U.S. appeals court in Georgia ruled in favor of the Atlanta Peace Alliance's request to go into high schools on career days to offer views that differ from the military's: "It is almost axiomatic that a valid decision is one made after weighing pros and cons. Students certainly cannot be expected to make important career choices based only on positive information."
The Atlanta school board, like Erie's, was content for students to receive a one-sided version of military life, replete with the customary recruitment hype and slogans. The Atlanta courts ruled that the school board "cannot exclude the APA because it disagreed with its view about the military."
Not all school boards are as intellectually afraid of diversity as Erie's or Atlanta's. Several in northern California decided during the Persian Gulf War to ban or restrict military recruiters on high school property. Others in California have moved to deny recruiters student directory information.
Unsurprisingly, supporters of one-sided education see those school boards in need of a spanking. California's legislature has two bills before it: one to withhold state money from school districts that deny access to military recruiters, the other to force districts to provide student directory information.
Anyone attempting to create even mild limits on the military's entrenchment in U.S. education can expect the treatment given Laurie Quiggle. During the 1980s, about $1.1 billion was spent annually by the Pentagon on military recruitment, from ads and commercials to stocking offices of guidance counselors with come-on brochures.
One source of resistance is the peace education division of the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. It recently began the Campaign to Demilitarize Schools, an invaluable program that holds promise of preventing our schools -- large numbers already being overrun with ROTC -- from becoming adjunct boot camps.
In Erie, Quiggle expects no fast demilitarizing of the high schools. She is grateful now merely to have the courts behind her: "I was made out to be a troublemaker. All I wanted was for students to realize that critical thinking is a crucial part of education, and war and peace are certainly issues calling for critical thinking... . Students do have a constitutional right to refuse military service, yet they seldom, if ever, hear about that right from their teachers or counselors."
In Erie, they are hearing it from Laurie Quiggle, no longer a lone voice.
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Revised: 07/19/2025 GDG
