The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), in collaboration with Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities - Project YANO,, has developed a new resource called, Guide to Removing Marksmanship Training from High Schools. This guide documents the process and strategies learned by the Education Not Arms Coalition comprised of students, teachers, and parents that successfully lobbied the San Diego California City school board for the removal of Shooting Ranges from eleven high schools in 2009 and adopting a zero-tolerance policy for marksmanship training in their school district. 

NNOMY recommends this proven strategy for organizing a campaign for the removal of marksmanship training on a school district level thus accomplishing an important aspect of school demilitarization.

Here are some of the accomplishments of the Education Not Arms Coalition strategy:

• School Board Votes to End Weapons Training in their school district.
  
• Marine Corps JROTC at one San Diego school fell so low that the unit was eventually forced to leave.
• Shooting ranges from eleven high schools in the San Diego school  district were closed in 2009

• Author : Pat Elder
• Publisher : Unknown
• Release Date : 2016-12-08
• Genre: Uncategoriezed
• Pages : 260
• ISBN 10 : 1540353753

Military Recruiting in the United States Book Description :

Military Recruiting in the United States provides a fearless and penetrating description of the deceptive practices of the U.S. military as it recruits American youth into the armed forces. Long-time antiwar activist Pat Elder exposes the underworld of American military recruiting in this explosive and consequential book. The book describes how recruiters manage to convince youth to enlist. It details a sophisticated psy-ops campaign directed at children. Elder describes how the military encourages first-person shooter games and places firearms into the hands of thousands using the schools, its JROTC programs, and the Civilian Marksmanship Program to inculcate youth with a reverence for guns. Previously unpublished investigative work reveals how indoor shooting ranges in schools are threatening the health of children and school staff through exposure to lead particulate matter. The book provides a kind of "what's coming next manual" for European peacemakers as they also confront a rising tide of militarism. The book examines the disturbing, nurturing role of the Catholic Church in recruiting youth. It surveys the wholesale military censorship of Hollywood films, pervasive military testing in the high schools, and an explosion of military programs directed toward youth.

For the past four years, TRC has published an annual report recording the involvement of the U.S. military in Western Massachusetts high schools. We started compiling data on military recruitment in 2012 by sending simple, one page requests to public high schools for information about the frequency of recruiter involvement. These went ignored by most schools. After submitting our inquiries in the form of Massachusetts Public Records Act requests, we received more responses. Responses collected between 2012-2015 were compiled into the first edition of Military Recruitment in Western Massachusetts High Schools. We repeated the process of submitting public record requests to schools to obtain information for the 2015-2016 School Year and the 2016-2017 School Year, which were compiled into the second and third edition respectively.

Download, read, and distribute
the National Call to respond to
increasing military, corporate
and conservative influence in
our public schools.

2022 version

Peace and Social Justice / KZFR - Gary Ghirardi, the Communications Staff Person, working out of the NNOMY national office at the San Diego Peace Campus in California, speaks about military counter-recruitment, past and present, on the Peace and Social Justice series of KZFR Community Radio in the Northern Sacramento Valley

24:00 minutes

The Northwest Suburban Peace & Education Project formed in the spring of 2004. We all lived and worked in the community. Many of us had children in the public schools. As parents and community members we were concerned about the role of the military in our schools. This became very clear in the run-up to the Iraq war. The government was beating the drums of war and the military recruiters were all over the high schools trying to recruit young people. We felt the need to offer an alternative view.

District 214 is the second largest high school district in the state of Illinois. It includes the suburbs of Elk Grove Village, Rolling Meadows, Arlington Heights, Wheeling, Mt Prospect, Prospect Heights and Buffalo Grove. There are six high schools. Together this includes about 12,000 students.

Starting in 2004 until 2019 we set up a table in the commons area in each high school usually once a month. We talked to the students; offered career alternatives; and tried to raise their awareness of the militarism in society. We often had a theme centered on a particular event – e.g. International Day of Peace, Memorial Day, Mother’s Day. We produced a zine which included submissions from District 214 students. And we hosted public events.

We had been losing members over the years. None of us have children or grandchildren in any D214 schools any longer. Then in 2019 the school district essentially made the decision for us by implementing a new policy which restricts all outside groups to one visit/semester. Although there were slight differences in how the policy was administered between the six high schools, it was a game changer for us. To be clear, the same policy applied to the military. In fact there was a rumor that the policy came about by a parent angry about the presence of recruiters at the school with free access to the students. Then the pandemic hit and access to students was limited. At that point we decided to disband. Our blog, which we started in 2010, follows.

Libby Frank June 2021

Despite constituting the formal mechanism by which states and militaries persuade and enrol their personnel, military recruitment is poorly understood in the social and political sciences. Tied either to a normative and partisan sociology which aims to provide applied solutions for recruitment and retention programmes, or subsumed under a broad banner, by critical scholars, of a global ‘cultural condition’ of militarisation, studies of recruitment lack the rigour they should be afforded. In exploring these issues, the paper offers a vision of critical military studies which takes seriously the efforts of counter-military recruiting activist and protest movements in the US and UK. Counter-recruitment activism is billed as the most practical way to resist policies of militarism and militarisation. In promoting locally situated, practical solutions to the effects of militarised cultures (often as part of activism in schools), it aims to expose the relationship between, and acts to correct, both local and global injustices. In reviewing the practical and conceptual basis for counter-recruiting strategies, and speaking to broader movements in feminist scholarship on militarisation, the paper demonstrates the importance of critical studies of military recruitment, and in so doing, argues for a critical military studies which is situated amidst the people and places militarism affects.

The Best Practices for Social Media Campaigning for Social Justice Organizing report covers the basic recommendations of how to use the big three social media platforms of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with an emphasis on promoting social justice issues tailored for counter military recruiting.

Are you troubled by frequent recruiter visits, ASVAB testing or JROTC in your schools? Are you having difficulty gaining equal school access to counter military recruiting? This workshop covers ways that activists have successfully approached these problems at the policy level. It’s been done in some of the largest school districts in the country (e.g., NY City, L.A., Chicago, San Diego), and at the state level in some cases. The policy approach is another powerful tool that can be useful for having an impact beyond individual school visits. The presentation reviews successful methods as well as some of the challenges organizers have encountered.

bit.ly/TOJTMQRpalmcard

Print and Cut counter-recruitment palm card good for leafleting in front of schools or for tabling.
Four QR Codes link to the following documents from activist resource sites as follows:

1. Do You Know Enough to Enlist? - American Friends Service Committee (2013)
2. The Military's Not Just a Job - War Resisters League (2023)
3. What Every Young Woman Should Know About the Military - War Resisters League (2022)
4. Thinking of Enlisting? Think Again - NNOMY - (2022)