Before You Enlist Video - http://beforeyouenlist.org
Researching Pop Culture and Militarism - https://nnomy.org/popcultureandmilitarism/
If you have been Harassed by a Military Recruiter -https://centeronconscience.org/abused-by-recruiters/
Back-to-School Kit for Counter-recruitment and School Demilitarization Organizing is focused on student privacy
WHAT IS IN THIS KIT? - https://nnomy.org/backtoschoolkit/
Click through to find out
Religion and militarism - https://nnomy.org/religionandmilitarism/
‘A Poison in the System’: Military Sexual Assault - New York Times
Change your Mind?
Talk to a Counselor at the GI Rights Hotline
Ask that your child's information is denied to Military Recruiters
And monitor that this request is honored.
Military Recruiters and Programs Target marginalized communities for recruits...
..and the high schools in those same communities

 Militarization of our Schools

The Pentagon is taking over our poorer public schools. This is the reality for disadvantaged youth.

 

What we can do

Corporate/conservative alliances threaten Democracy . Progressives have an important role to play.

 Why does NNOMY matter?

Most are blind or indifferent to the problem.
A few strive to protect our democracy.

Articles

The Military Invasion of My High School: The role of JROTC

Sylvia McGauley -

“Will you please write me a letter of recommendation for the Navy, Ms. McGauley? You’re my best class.” Thanh was enrolled in the recently established Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) at our high school and he, like many of my students, was enamored with the military’s alluring promises of a magic carpet ride away from poverty and uncertainty.

Air Force JROTC students from Buena Park High School, Coronado, California, 2006.  U.S. Navy photo by Hermes CrespoMy heart ripped as I listened to Thanh’s plea. I want to do what is best for my kids. I want to support and honor them in making their own informed decisions. But, given the impact of JROTC at our school, I felt very uneasy about the balance of information students like Thanh were receiving about enlistment in the U.S. military. After much discussion with Thanh, I wrote an honest letter, emphasizing his sensitive poetic nature and his commitment to fairness. The Navy eagerly welcomed him.

The sprawling campus of Reynolds High School (RHS), the second largest high school in Oregon, rests atop a ridge at the entrance to the scenic Columbia River Gorge in tiny Troutdale, 17 miles east of downtown Portland. When I first started teaching here 23 years ago, Reynolds was an almost all white, working-class, conservative, sub-rural community, culturally distinct from its larger urban neighbor. As Portland has become more gentrified, lower rents have attracted numerous low-income families—immigrant, African American, Latina/o, and white. Today, the Reynolds School District is a high-poverty, culturally diverse district with two of the poorest elementary schools in the state—perfect prey for military recruiters who win points for filling the coffers of the poverty draft.

During the Vietnam War era, much was written about JROTC’s role in teaching military training; today JROTC high school (and even middle school) programs incorporate a broader curricular agenda and are expanding rapidly. Yet, within the education community, little has been written about the implications and effects of JROTC in schools.

DeKalb Schools Military Catch Basin

Michael Burke -

Cross Keys High SchoolAt least one DeKalb County high school that we know of is totally ignoring the 1987 and 1988 ruling of the Searcy v. Crim case decided by the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. With every misdeed and instance of corruption in past years, by the DeKalb Board of Education (BOE), one would think  our latest superintendent, Michael Thurmond, interim though he may be, would look into what's going on at Cross Keys HS and other county high schools.

Let us all have a fair accounting of what's really going on in our county schools -- do we own these schools or does the Pentagon?  Military recruiters are being given free reign of CKHS and we're hoping the new fulltime principal, Mr. Heard, will get a firm grip on this situation and diligently work
with Mr. Thurmond, by paying heed to the current violations of the court ruling outlined above.  Our organization is certainly not picking on CKHS alone, it's more like we're focusing on this school because of its' many violations of Searcy v. Crim over the years.  At the very least, we must have
a true accounting of why a detachment of three USMC recruiters were allowed into CKHS on the school's opening day?

Since then they've been back several times and so have we.  Army recruiters are not far behind in showing a presence.  Again on Thursday, September 18, Marine recruiters were actually pulling juniors and seniors out of their classrooms to check on the students' progress -- as in how ripe were these children for induction, training and deployment a year or two from now?  Yes, high school students are all children unless they have reached adulthood, which in Georgia is eighteen.

Unfortunately, the foregoing is not the entire story.  Searcy v. Crim specifically rules that if military personnel are permitted access to the school's annual career day then other groups and prospective employers will also be allowed to set up tables and distribute literature to students.  Yet here's another Catch 22 -- according to the head CKHS guidance counselor, Tanya Henderson, there is only one career day a year -- in November!

On My Son’s First Day of Kindergarten: OurSchoolsAreNotFailing.org organizes communities to defend their schools from NCLB

Jesse Hagopian -

No to NCLBToday is the first day of school in Seattle. I have never been more excited and nervous for the first day because, not only do I start teaching, but my 5-year-old starts kindergarten! My son is so thrilled for his first day of school and our family feels so fortunate to have such a wonderful public school to send him to.

Unfortunately, the irreparably flawed No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has cast a shadow on what should be a joyous start to the year. As explained below, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan revoked the NCLB waiver for Washington state because our legislature would not tie teacher evaluations to test scores. Revoking the NCLB waiver then labeled nearly every school in the state a failure and mandated that districts notify parents that their child attends a failing school.

My son’s school is not a failure. The school where I teach is not a failure. It is the test-and-punish policy of NCLB that is failing.

Featured

JROTC as a substitute for PE: really?

Monica A. F. Lounsbery, Kathryn A. Holt, Shannon A. Monnat, Thomas L. McKenzie, and Brian Funk - Physical inactivity is receiving growing attention given its documented relationship to a variety of chronic health (Strong et al., 2005) and metabolic challenges (Owen, Healy, Matthews, & Dunstan, 2010) and the fact that most adults and children do not meet physical activity guidelines (Troiano et al., 2008; USDHHS, 2008). For over two decades, the importance of schools in providing and promoting physical activity has been consistently emphasized (Institute of Medicine, 2013; Pate et al., 2008), but with the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, school physical activity programs, including physical education (PE), have instead sustained reduced time and resource allocations (McKenzie & Lounsbery, 2009).

PE is a primary strategy because it (a) is institutionalized as part of the K-12 curriculum and as such, has the potential to reach nearly all students, (b) is the only program where the least active children can experience physical activity at higher intensities, and has the potential to significantly contribute to daily accrual of moderate to vigorous physical activity, increase fitness, develop and improve motor and other generalizable skills. Though PE is a key evidence-based strategy for providing and promoting physical activity (Institute of Medicine, 2013; Ward, 2011) and a goal of Healthy People 2020 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010) there are many practice and policy barriers to its effective delivery; thus, its potential to impact health has not been fully realized (McKenzie & Lounsbery, 2009). Among these policy barriers is the pervasive practice of allowing waivers/exemptions and/or substitutions for physical education. This includes allowing alternative programs such as JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer’s Reserve Corps), interscholastic sports, marching band, cheerleading, and community sports to substitute for PE enrollment (NASPE, 2012), a practice which has been of great concern to the profession (Abernathy, 1960; NASPE, 2006; Sims, 2011) and public health officials (e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011) for many years.

The militarization of American public schools

Steve Filips and Don Barrett -

Syracuse, New York’s Fowler High School to be “reformed”

Photo from the Syracuse City School District web site promoting the Military Science Academy
This fall, Syracuse, New York will join the still small but growing list of public schools dedicated to the training of students for military service in the United States Armed Forces.

This past April, the Syracuse Central School District (SCSD) approved the closure of Fowler High School in the city’s impoverished Westside section and its transformation into the Public Service Leadership Academy (PSLA), which will focus on training students for military service, to work in the Department of Homeland Security, or as police officers and firefighters.

There are 18 military academies as part of the public school system in the United States. Six are located in Chicago. All of these schools are associated with the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), whose goals include indoctrinating students with “patriotism,” “responsiveness to all authority” and an increasing “respect for the role of the US Armed Forces in support of national objectives.”

Most of these schools are located in working class and low-income communities and rely upon the lack of job and college options available to students to push them into the military.

The Westside section of Syracuse is one such area. It is a poverty-stricken area of the city that has been struggling with increasing inequality in the Obama “economic recovery,” and staggering levels of poverty, particularly among children. Childhood poverty approaches 50 percent and for those in the 18-24 year age bracket—those just out of high school—the rate approaches two thirds. (See: “Syracuse, New York housing in shambles” and “Deindustrialization and unemployment in Syracuse, New York”)

Drones Are a Military Recruiting Issue

Seth Kershner  -

16 CFES Scholars were among the 92 middle school students nationwide who spent three days at the United States Military Academy at West Point last week for the summer STEM  (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) WorkshopOver the past several years, activists have fought against the use of unmanned aircraft (commonly called “drones”) to carry out targeted killings in the war on terror. Anti-drone activists have aimed their protests at a number of different targets. They have condemned university research on drone technology (e.g., at Johns Hopkins), held spirited public demonstrations at launch sites (e.g., outside Hancock Air Force Base in upstate New York), and they have pursued more traditional forms of political lobbying. However, their strategy so far has failed to address the ways in which the public, including children, are taught to uncritically embrace this technology. In this article, I will call attention to the previously unreported use of drone simulators in Army recruiting vans and begin a discussion about how to resist their steady march across America.

The fleet of vehicles in the Army’s Mobile Exhibit Command (MEC) form a powerful weapon in the Army’s recruiting arsenal. A unit of the U.S. Army Accessions Support Brigade, the MEC helps meet the brigade’s mission of “ Connecting America’s Army with America’s People.” Their job is to normalize state violence, including drone warfare, and in FY2013, the recruiters driving these vehicles logged more than 600,000 miles traveling to schools, universities, state fairs, and other events in 48 states. What follows is a brief look at three vehicles from the MEC -- in particular, those that help children learn to love the Reaper.

The oldest of the three vehicles, the Army Aviation Adventure van, debuted in May 2002. Inside this converted 18-wheeler, van visitors will find Army careers kiosks, along with an ammunition display and an array of weapons simulators designed to immerse the visitor in real-life experiences. These include an Apache Flight Simulator, a Kiowa Warrior Flight Simulator, and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Simulator, which, according to one source, is based on the Hunter drone. While the high school and college market is the van’s primary target, a quick review of news stories on the Web turned up one report of a nine-year-old trying out the van’s simulators.

The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) is supported by individual contributions and a grant by the Craigslist Charitable Fund - 2023 Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. NNOMY websites are hosted by The Electric Embers Coop.

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