Rick Jahnkow -

When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view.

This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:

Until 1986, COMD was named the San Diego Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD). In 1983, CARD attempted to place anti-draft registration ads in numerous high school newspapers around San Diego County. Student journalists at most of the schools published the ads, but administrators in the Grossmont Union H.S. District banned the ads from all of its student newspapers. San Diego CARD felt it was the students’ right to decide the issue, but since they weren’t going to be given that right, we filed a lawsuit against the Grossmont district in federal district court, citing violations of our First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. We requested a preliminary injunction from the court to suspend the ad ban while we waited to see if a trial would be necessary. The district court judge in San Diego refused to issue the preliminary injunction and we appealed his decision.

Rick Jahnkow -

Students at Mission Bay High School in San Diego are now celebrating what amounts to a very rare organizing victory: the expulsion of a Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps unit from their school. The accomplishment is especially remarkable given that it happened in an area with one of the largest concentrations of military personnel and war industry in the world. San Diego County, with over 100,000 active duty sailors and Marines, has a Department of Defense payroll that frequently tops all other regions in the U.S. It’s not the sort of place where you would expect a rejection of anything military.

There are more than 3000 high schools in the U.S. with JROTC, the Pentagon’s high school military training and indoctrination program. Over the years, those who have objected to having such courses in their schools have learned that when a JROTC unit gets established, it is almost impossible to remove it with a campaign of protest directed at school administrators and governing boards. The reason is that once JROTC is present, the cadets — who are organized in military ranks — can be used as a lobbying force that will intimidate even the most anti-militarist school board. Activists in San Francisco, for example, have failed in multiple attempts to eliminate the program.

Rick Jahnkow -

Counter-recruitment and school demilitarization work in the U.S. has gone through several cycles of expansion and contraction during the last few decades. The first expansion was during the early 1980s when it was supported by a small number of national organizations, such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), War Resisters League, Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO) and National Lawyers Guild. Most grassroots activities at the time were carried out by chapters of these organizations and a number of independent community peace groups (including COMD and, eventually, Project YANO).

Many counter-recruitment organizers in the 1980s came from the Vietnam-era anti-draft movement, so it was common for them to include draft counseling information as they also worked to counter the presence of military recruiters in schools. This dual emphasis was encouraged by the return of Selective Service registration in 1980 and the government’s various efforts to coerce young men into compliance. Frequently, organizers saw no distinction between the issues of recruiting and Selective Service registration, which had both positive and negative consequences. It was positive in the sense that fear of a possible return to the draft fueled more youth-focused organizing and helped increase awareness of recruiting and militarism in schools. But on the negative side, the frequent focus on Selective Service kept many activists from fully comprehending that economics had become the primary factor driving the militarization of young people, and that draft counseling was not an effective approach to the problem. Another negative consequence was that as concern about conscription diminished in the late 1980s, the overall level of counter-recruitment work also fell considerably.

Rick Jahnkow -

It is encouraging to observe the contemporary anti-war movement’s recent shift toward giving greater attention to military recruiting. This means that a growing number of individuals and organizations now understand that there is an organizing strategy that can be employed with much more effectiveness than the symbolic protest that has characterized most anti-war activism since September 11, 2001. People are finally looking deeper into the issues and understanding that no matter how frightening and uncontrollable the Bush administration may seem, it has a very reachable Achilles heel when it comes to needing human resources to wage its wars.