Taking Aim at Jr. ROTC

Parents, students and teachers in Los Angeles are putting a dent in recruiting high schoolers for the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC), Sonia Nazario reported in the Feb. 19 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

JROTC, a program sponsored by the Department of Defense, functions like a school club, enlisting high school students and offering uniforms and special class activities, including phys. ed., map reading, target practice, marching drill, financial planning and how to make PowerPoint presentations.

Like ROTC, its college-level counterpart, JROTC’s attraction is that students who join the military after finishing the program can start off with higher pay and have a leg up in joining the armed forces’ officer corps.

Such perks are usually thought to be a powerful attraction to kids in the nation’s less advantaged areas, where a military career has long been seen as a route to social and economic mobility.

“Nationally,” Nazario noted, “59.9% of JROTC participants are students of color,” citing research conducted by California State University at Northridge. And, she continued, this is how JROTC’s numbers play out in Los Angeles. The program “is in nearly half of the city’s high schools, but none on the affluent Westside.”

Nonetheless, enrollment in JROTC has been dropping in Los Angeles –- despite increases elsewhere, and a massive infusion of funding from the DoD –- due to effective opposition by a grassroots group, the Coalition Against Militarism in Our Schools, that now operates in 50 of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 61 high schools.

Bolstered by a 1986 decision rendered by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which Nazario notes, “requires public schools that allow [military] recruiters on campus to give counter-recruiters a shot at addressing students,” the Coalition has been effective in getting students and parents to recognize that military life consists of not just guns and glory, but also coffins and educational budget cuts.

Among the points made by JROTC opponents at Roosevelt High School, in L.A.’s Boyle Heights, Nazario wrote, is that the program

drains resources from more important courses. Although the Defense Department pays half of JROTC instructors’ salaries, L.A. Unified pays the rest, as well as benefits, for a total of $3.1 million this school year. That money … should instead be spent adding more of the 15 academic courses students need to go to college.

That point was succinctly summed up on a T-shirt one teacher wore to class: “A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind.”

There are other statistics in the L.A. Times account, however, that should make people stop and wonder about the extent to which JROTC –- like much of the rest of the U.S. military budget –- is simply a waste of money:

• Only “40% of students who graduated from high school with two or more years of JROTC ended up in the military,” according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1999, the last time a comprehensive study of the program was undertaken.

• First Sgt. Otto Harrington, senior teacher for Roosevelt High’s JROTC program, told Nazario that few of his students join the military. Moreover, “Only 5% of his cadets would even qualify to enlist … because the rest are in the country illegally, couldn’t pass the military aptitude test, are in trouble with the law or are overweight.”

As it turns out, Sgt. Harrington doesn’t need a map reading course to decipher the lay of the land at Roosevelt High, Nazario writes at the end of her account. During the past three years, only three of the sergeant’s JROTC cadets have enlisted in the military. And he plans to leave both the high school and JROTC when the school year ends.

You can read the complete text of Sonia Nazario’s article in the Los Angeles Times, entitled “Junior ROTC takes a hit in L.A.,” at the Los Angeles Times' Web site: www.latimes.com.

-- Posted by Adam Simms