Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)

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From Draft NOtices, January-March 2023

- Rick Jahnkow

     A recent series of articles in the New York Times has drawn attention to some of the most egregious features of high school JROTC that are being protested by critics of militarism in the educational system. Included in the series is a December 11, 2022, front-page exposé of schools involuntarily enrolling students in the military training program, and then making it difficult for them to transfer out.

To write the article, journalist Mike Baker and other Times associates collected enrollment data using over 200 records requests sent to schools around the country. The data revealed the following:

[Dozens] of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75% of students in a single grade into the classes, including schools in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Alabama.

It was also noted in the article that, “a vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households.”

In Chicago recently, the public school system acknowledged that automatic enrollment in JROTC was a significant issue. The school district’s inspector general issued a report concluding that it was a problem experienced disproportionately in lower-income neighborhoods. The report also revealed that over the past two years, nearly all ninth graders at 10 Chicago high schools were automatically enrolled in JROTC while procedures for opting out of the program were not clearly communicated with students and parents.

JROTC is in approximately 3500 high schools around the U.S. The military courses are taught by retired military officers hired by the schools, using textbooks produced by and for the various military branches (see past issues of Draft NOtices for textbook excerpts that were compiled in 2021 by Project YANO). Though the military claims it is not a recruiting program, advocates of the program have told Congress that it is the military’s best in-school recruiting program. In one recent example, during his 2019 congressional testimony, Secretary of the Army Mark Esper acknowledged that JROTC “tends to . . . encourage kids to join the military at higher rates than anywhere else.”

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From Draft NOtices, October-December 2022

— Lauren Reyna Morales

In July of 2022, the New York Times published an explosive report detailing widespread abuse of high school students at the hands of trusted, powerful adults. These adults gained access to their young victims in their schools, as instructors in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC). JROTC is a federal program sponsored by the United States Armed Forces that partners with high schools across America. The U.S. Army JROTC website describes the program as “one of the largest character development and citizenship programs for youth in the world.” JROTC professes that their curriculum promotes leadership, character building, and community service for their young adult students.
 

The article “‘I Felt Trapped’: Sexual Abuse of Teens in the Military’s JROTC Program” was the result of a thorough investigation performed by the New York Times. Research for the report included interviewing 13 victims, school employees, and a former JROTC instructor. “Thousands of court documents, investigative files and other records obtained through more than 150 public disclosure requests” were also examined. The findings of this wide-scope examination are shocking and plentiful. The investigation uncovered that in the last five years, at least 33 JROTC instructors have been criminally charged with sexual misconduct involving their students.

Various other instructors were also accused of sexual assault during this time, but never criminally charged. The Times findings show that there is one arrest in every 232 instructor positions — a rate that is severely more frequent than the civilian-teacher arrest ratio. Students have reported incidents of sexual assault at the hands of JROTC instructors “in classrooms and supply closets, during field trips or on late-night rides home, sometimes committed after instructors plied students with alcohol or drugs.” Victims interviewed in the article shared their unique experiences falling into the hands of this abuse. Geography and specifics may have separated them, but their stories followed roughly the same outline: A military veteran who led a JROTC course offered at their school posed himself as a mentor to gain their trust, exploit his power, and horrifically abuse them.

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From Draft NOtices, October-December 2022

 — David Morales

Recently, the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (YANO) was invited to speak with students at Lincoln High School in San Diego, California. It was among the first of our typical counter-recruitment classroom talks since the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The invitation came specifically from the Lincoln High chapter of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA). MEChA is a student organization with roots in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s that seeks to cultivate pride in one’s Chicanx/Latin American culture, promotes higher education, and instills a sense of responsibility to one’s community.

I was particularly excited to volunteer for this talk and to have the opportunity to share with these students. Thirteen years ago, when I was a MEChA member at Mission Bay High, it was both of our schools’ MEChA chapters that played a key role in a campaign to end JROTC weapons training in the San Diego Unified School District.

I was joined by Armando Pérez for the conversation at Lincoln H.S. Armando is an Army veteran who is now a middle school teacher in San Diego and a volunteer with Project YANO. We joined the students via Zoom — a novel way for us to engage in our outreach work as a result of the pandemic. We spoke to a group of approximately 15 students and 2 teachers. The week before they had watched the counter-recruitment video “Before You Enlist,” www.beforeyouenlist.org.

After introducing ourselves during the Zoom session, students proceeded to ask us some really direct questions that demonstrated their genuine desire for this important information and conversation. As always, the most valuable contribution came from Armando and his ability, as a veteran, to speak from first-hand experience.

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Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS

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:

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