Marshall Blesofsky - From Draft NOtices, January-March 2019
On February 14, 2018, the unthinkable but all-too-common happened. A mass shooting occurred at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Rumors about the identity of the shooter were that he was a former student who had been in JROTC. One week later, on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman's guest was Pat Elder, the director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy. This organization works to counter the access that the military has to students in high schools. Mr. Elder went on to state that the shooter was trained in the marksmanship program at the same high school. On the day of the murders, the shooter wore his JROTC shirt. Also, among the killed were three JROTC students.
Long Beach Recruitment Awareness Project (LB RAP) is an organization that has been working to safeguard the privacy of students through what we call truth-in-recruitment. Military recruiters in our school district can visit the schools almost any time they wish. They collect student contact information and use it to pursue them. We have documented cases of students who have been hounded by recruiters without their parents' consent and lured by false promises to join the military.