COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Counter-Recruitment: General
Texas Youth Fight the War Aimed at Them
Jordan Buckley, alternet.org
April 19, 2006
A
suburban packed full of high school students barreled south toward the
Mexican border Tuesday, and while several of the same gaggle of youth
had missed classes the week before -- then marching nearly nine miles
through the Texas heat from their campus to the state capitol in
protest of proposed immigration reforms -- this time around, their
absence is excused.
Today, they will present on their dynamic involvement within the
so-called "counter-recruitment movement" at the Women and War
Conference hosted by South Texas College in McAllen, situated six hours
from their home in Austin.
Seldom are teenagers invited to speak at collegiate academic
conferences, but the Youth Activists of Austin (YAA!) are growing
accustomed to blazing new trails. YAA! -- a citywide coalition of
mostly high school-aged social justice enthusiasts -- have drawn broad
attention to what they argue are the unacceptable practices of military
recruiters within their schools.
Indeed, the pervasive misconduct of military recruiters on a national
scale spurred the U.S. Army Recruiting Command to declare a one-day
abstention from pursuing enlistments last May, instead allowing them to
"refocus on their values."
In January, YAA! unleashed a new campaign to urge the Austin
Independent School District (AISD) to follow the lead of other school
districts across the country by placing reasonable restrictions on the
on-campus activities of military recruiters.
Recently, grassroots campaigns in a number of towns have resulted in
policy changes. In Tucson, Ariz., students must initiate interactions
with recruiters and not the reverse; in Princeton, N.J., recruiters can
only meet with students in the presence of guidance counselors; in
Madison, Wis., recruiters are limited to three high school visits a
year, and guidance counselors are required to provide information to
students on alternatives to military service.
Spurred by these reforms and abuses they had witnessed firsthand, YAA!
members drafted a ten-point platform outlining policy changes that they
determined fair and necessary to ensuring healthily maintained schools.
They began by attending AISD board meetings and relaying their concerns
to administrators en masse.
One plank of their proposed platform -- banning military hardware from
campuses -- stems from recruiters' attempts to seduce enlistees through
the use of spectacular technical equipment, which functions as
aggressive advertising for military service and the war rather than
examples of technological achievement with academic merit, YAA! argues.
Recently, Travis High School, a predominantly lower-income and nonwhite
school located in southern Austin, was visited by one of the Army's
Cinema Vans -- a multimillion-dollar 18-wheeler containing highly
sophisticated war simulation video games. Educators there informed
students that they had to "sign up" for the van to get credit for P.E.
class -- a move which put the students' personal information in
recruiters' hands, thereby better enabling them to contact these
students individually and convince them to enlist.
Other components of YAA!'s proposed platform include: requiring
recruiters to check-in at the front office and wear a name tag upon
every campus visit, requiring parental consent for administration of
the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, allowing students
to "opt-out" of releasing their personal information to recruiters
while remaining eligible for contact from universities, and forbidding
recruiters from classroom and school assembly presentations unless the
content of their speech is directly applicable to class curriculum.
For YAA! member Timothy Bray, a senior at Westlake High School, the
latter plank responds to an episode at his school where administrators
afforded a military recruiter a gymnasium filled with captive audience
members to mark Veterans Day.
But in addition to navigating the traditional channels for
institutional change, YAA! also operates on a number of different
fronts to raise consciousness about (and to consequently interrupt)
recruiters' quest for youthful enlistees.
After recruiters plotted a visit to Austin Community College in
December, YAA! members hung a banner from the roof of one of the
schools' buildings that read "Homophobic War Recruiters Off ACC!" --
the recruiters relocated to another campus only to be confronted there
by dozens of quickly mobilized counter-recruitment activists.
YAA! has elicited media attention for staging "read-in" protests
outside of the AISD headquarters. The "Better Well-Read Than Dead"
vigils alert passersby to YAA!'s opposition to unduly aggressive campus
recruitment while reinforcing the group's top priority -- fair access
to education.
Likewise, later this month YAA! will launch the "Enlightenment not
Enlistment Program" whereby students may trade in military recruitment
literature mailed to their houses at local participating bookstores to
receive a 10 percent discount on purchases.
On Saturday, YAA! will reveal their newest tactic to combat those
trying to put them in a war zone -- Protest-in-a-can. The ready-to-go
kit easily fits in a locker and contains all necessary materials to
demonstrate against recruiters' sudden presence on a campus: a banner,
tape recorder, chant list, media call list and counter-recruitment
literature. The cans will be piloted in two high schools before
possibly being amended and reproduced for further use throughout
Austin, says LBJ High School freshman Kate Kelly.
Already, YAA! appears to have made real advances in their campaign with
AISD. The school district's attorney, Mel Waxler, has disseminated
YAA!'s platform to the principals at all of AISD's 12 high schools and
will soon make a recommendation of reforms to the board of trustees
based on YAA!'s proposal.
Until then, YAA! remains poised to continue countering the government's
efforts to shuttle youth abroad for war-making -- whether it takes them
to the school district headquarters, their schools' hallways, the city
streets or the riverbanks of the Rio Grande.
Jordan Buckley is a writer based in Austin, Texas, who also works
as a guest teacher for the Austin Independent School District.
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