COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch
Uncle Sam Wants…You? US Military Recruiting Teachers to help Recruit Students!!
Cynthia Kopkowski, National Education Association
April 2007
One of
the U.S. Marine Corps' newest "recruits" is running through the mud on
Parris Island, South Carolina—the training depot where nearly
17,000 enlistees submit to a grueling 13-week boot camp each year. A
second later, she scrambles up a 20-foot-high rope wall and launches
herself over the top. The next morning, Bethany Deckard will tuck her
cheek into the cold contours of an M16 and fire multiple rounds to
practice "engaging" the enemy. For the Marines, just having Deckard at
the depot is a victory. Even though she will never actually become a
Marine, she interacts daily with hundreds of students who might.
Deckard is a high school teacher, and that makes her one of the
military's most highly sought allies right now.
The Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force are working overtime to win
the attention of teachers and education support professionals in order
to reach their ultimate quarry: students. The Bush Administration's
announcement this winter that the Army and Marine Corps must increase
their active duty ranks by 92,000 in the next five years means even
more pressure on military recruiters to gain access to educators'
classrooms—where they're not always welcome.
Educators, parents, and other activists are demanding restrictions on
recruiters in districts in New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maryland,
California, and elsewhere, and polls show the war in Iraq and calls for
more troop deployments are opposed by a majority of the public.
While teachers have never been disregarded by the military, the idea of
actively wooing them on a day-to-day basis "may have been more
energized recently, given the political environment," acknowledges Jane
Arabian, the Department of Defense's assistant director for enlistment.
The Army's School Recruiting Program Handbook reveals just how closely
recruiters are now paying attention to educators—whom it calls
"key influencers." "Ensure an Army presence in all secondary schools,"
the manual advises. "School ownership is the goal." How best to do
that? "Be indispensable to school administration, counselors, faculty,
and students. Be so helpful and so much a part of the school scene that
you are in constant demand, so if anyone has any questions about the
military service, they call you first!" (See "By the Book," page 37.)
Using teachers is "a very clever marketing technique," says Allen
Kanner, a clinical psychologist and researcher whose work in part
focuses on military recruiting. In the last few years the military
hired private firms, including those that specialize in marketing to
children, to learn how to best gain a stronghold in schools, Kanner
says. "Teachers are role models, and if they approve of something, then
the students believe the whole school system approves of it," he
explains.
It's
the same thing you'll hear from Curtis Gilroy, the head of recruitment
for the Department of Defense. "Teachers are a significant influencer,
there's no question about it," he says. "We just want the cadre of
teachers, regardless of political persuasion or background, to speak
about the military objectively."
So while you may worry that students are tuning you out in homeroom,
the Army thinks otherwise. "Before you can expect any type of
assistance from school officials or be accepted by students, you must
first establish rapport and credibility," states the Army recruiting
handbook. "You must convince [educators] that you have their students'
best interests in mind."
That's exactly what the Marines are hoping to do as they put the 80 or
so educators from Louisville, Kentucky, and Richmond, Virginia, through
their paces at Parris Island. Each year, they bring 12 groups of
educators through the all-expenses- paid workshop, at a cost of roughly
$57,000 per visit. The Army, Navy, and Air Force host similar programs.
"We're looking at those people on the fence, or more than likely, who
are uninformed," says Parris Island spokesman Lt. Scott Miller. "We're
just trying to inform them. Are we trying to win them? Yeah. We have a
quota." If recruiters successfully target the teachers first, then they
have, Miller says, "another foot in the door, so to speak."
In Tucson, Arizona, Rolande Baker had had enough of the feet in her and
her colleagues' doors. The special education and government teacher
successfully lobbied the the Sunnyside School District Governing Board
last year to severely curtail recruiters' access to schools.
Baker was initially rankled by an ever-burgeoning number of recruiters
interrupting students' lunches, coming up to their tables, offering to
buy them chips and nachos. After school, she'd see them handing out
pencils and bumper stickers. Then the recruiters' attention turned to
Baker and her colleagues.
"They would put slips of paper in our mailboxes that said, 'How would
you like to have a day off from class? Let us come speak to your
students,'" she says. "It would make me so angry, I would tear it up
into little pieces."
During the first three weeks of the 2005 school year, recruiters
visited her school 38 times, says Baker. During that same period,
college recruiters visited three times. Ninety-one percent of students
at Sunnyside High are Black or Hispanic, and she believes that made her
and her colleagues a particularly attractive target.
"It's very insidious," says Arlene Inouye, a speech and language
specialist in Los Angeles schools and the coordinator of the Coalition
Against Militarism in Our Schools. "It's become very clear that
recruiters want to be an integral part of the school so that people
will look at them and their position will not be questioned."
Becoming an integral part of the schools includes the Educator
Workshops on Parris Island, where Bethany Deckard and her colleagues
gather for the four-day, behind-the scenes look at recruits' experience
there. Make that somewhat of a behind-the-scenes look.
While
workshop participants settle into auditorium seats for a presentation
by a gregarious colonel, who speaks about the Marines' focus on
character development, discipline, esprit de corps, and military
bearing, a drill instructor a half-mile away is screaming through the
grey morning at a recruit. A recruit who, on her 21st day of training,
finds herself paralyzed with fear atop a wooden beam perched several
feet above the ground. For nearly five minutes she wobbles, knees
shaking, turning her stricken, damp face away as her drill instructor
screams, "Your tears do nothing for me."
For most of the educators, the emotional high point of the trip comes
when watching two companies ending their training receive the revered
Marine Corps pin at an event called the emblem ceremony, and then the
next morning, seeing their stirring graduation ceremony. Many teachers
wipe tears from their eyes during both ceremonies. Proud
"ooh-rahs"—a trademark Marine cry—come from at least five
former Marines in their ranks.
"I know kids who would benefit from the discipline and learning about
the honor and commitment," says Victor Smith, a math and special
education teacher from Richmond. "Those who haven't been exposed don't
understand." Like the rest of the group, he snaps photos throughout the
visit and plans to incorporate the experience into his classroom work
in the coming weeks. Assistant Principal Donna Buzonas of Newport News,
Virginia, says she was "shocked" to see how young the recruits look,
but "it makes me proud that they're instilling the right values in
them," she says. "If [my] kids have questions, I'll be able to answer
them."
IN MANY DISTRICTS, THE QUESTIONS now revolve around how and where
recruiters can operate. In Baker's school district, recruiters now can
come on campus only once a month. They meet only with students who
request an appointment, and those meetings must take place in a
designated area, not in the halls or classrooms. During annual
registration, Sunnyside distributes a card that lets parents opt in on
having their child's contact information sent to the Department of
Defense for recruiting purposes. The current No Child Left Behind
provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act require that
to get federal funding, schools must turn over that contact information
unless parents opt out. Tucson's more restrictive opt-in approach is
the same one that NEA advocates. In 2005, Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA)
introduced the Student Privacy Protection Act, which would amend NCLB
to require an opt-in system.
Bethany Deckard wasn't lobbying to keep recruiters out of her school
hallways, but she also wasn't likely to point students toward a
recruiter. "Honestly, I was real leery and probably not encouraging
it," Deckard, an English teacher, confides quietly aboard the bus on
the first day of her Parris Island visit. "It's still hard for me. I
was talking to one teacher here and she was saying, 'I'm excited for my
kids,' and I'm thinking, 'They could die.'"
By the end of her stay at Parris Island, Deckard's opinion has evolved.
As the bright marching tune of a brass band fills the hangar where
graduation is about to begin, she reflects positively on her time on
the island. "When I was watching the emblem ceremony yesterday, I just
felt so proud to be a part of the United States," she says. At this,
her voice wavers. "I'm so grateful for the sacrifices they make."
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