Proposed Policies on Access to Schools and Student Information for the Purposes of Military Recruitment (Montgomery County):  A document developed by Montgomery County parents to ensure that students and parents understand their rights related to military recruitment.

Thinking of joining the military to find a job or training? Resources for MD youth.

Student Peace Action Network: Materials and linkages for student activists.

Youth and Militarism:  Materials and information on military enlistment of youth from the Quaker group, American Friends Service Community.  

Project YANO:  The Project on Youth and Nonmilitary Opportunities  provides young people with an alternative point of view about military enlistment.

Leave My Child Alone:  Comprehensive information on the legal basis for provision of personal data to military recruiters and what individuals and groups can do.

Information on the No Child Left Behind Act:  How parents and youth can opt out of having personal data provided to military recruiters.

Center on Conscience and War:  An organization dedicated to extending and defending the rights of conscientious objectors to war and violence.                                                

Women Say No to Militarization of Youth:  Materials and information by CODEPINK related to counter-recruitment.

Want to get involved in countering the presence of military recruiters in Montgomery County's High Schools?  Here are things you can do:

1) Assist in an effort to place the brochure "Do you know enough to enlist?"  in each of the county's high schools.  Click here to see a copy of this brochure, developed by the American Friends Service Committee. 

2) Join activists who meet with students on school grounds to talk about the potential perils of a military career and serious problems associated with the military recruitment contract. Click here. For information on reaching students, e-mail here.

3) Solicit residents to endorse the PeaceAction Montgomery policy for schools in Montgomery County.  To endorse the proposal, click here.

4)  Conduct a study on the degree of curricular oversight exercised over the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC)  in Montgomery County compared to selected jurisdictions across the country.  Help conduct a study of the political content of the JROTC textbooks currently in use in NCPS and across the state. See article here. To volunteer, or for more info, click here.

5) Attend meetings of PeaceAction Montgomery: 7 p.m., first and third Thurs. of the month, Cedar Lane Unitarian Church, 9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda. Directions here.

6) Assist with a campaign to educate people about the MCPS "opt out" form.  Click here for more information.

7) E-mail the school board to let them know your feelings regarding these issues.

If you're concerned with military recruiters roaming the halls and casually socializing with school children in Montgomery County's high schools, please read on.  We are determined to reign in the influence and access military recruiters enjoy in our public schools.

In Montgomery County, we've managed to convince school officials to aggressively market their opt-out form, which allows parents to remove their children's names from lists being forwarded to aggressive military recruiters.  The form is now printed in six languages and is mailed home to all households.  Still, the schools insist that only parents may opt out, while the law says students may also do so.  Also, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) forces people to opt out every year.  Federal law says it may be done in perpetuity. For Federal law, click here.

Although the military administers its Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to students in the county's schools, students must now have a signed permission form from parents to take the 4-hour test, and the results are no longer forwarded to recruiters.  This change in policy has deprived the military of a virtual treasure-trove of data. Click here for more information about the ASVAB and here for the ASVAB Privacy Statement.

The schools have also allowed the placement of counter-recruitment materials that ask children to consider the fact that they may be called on to kill and may be killed themselves if they join the military.  The military's omnipresent literature fails to mention these facts, and recruiters often fail to tell children the enlistment contract is for 8 years and that its terms may be changed, without notice, by the military for any reason.

Thanks to a lobbying effort by PeaceAction Montgomery, the military's Junior Reserve Officer Training Program (JROTC) that operates in the schools no longer markets its program to 8th graders in the county. Until this year, Montgomery County 12-year-olds received literature extolling the virtues of the JROTC Program, encouraging them to attend a particular school.

And, we've been instrumental in preventing Army recruiting vans on campus. Click here for more information on these vans.

We are still demanding the implementation of a policy that equally regulates all recruiters--military, corporate and college. Depending upon the principal's attitude on the subject, military recruiters are given access to the entire student body during lunch at some schools, while they're relegated to the guidance office in others.  For their part, military recruiters frequent schools with high percentages of economically disadvantaged youth while they largely ignore the wealthy kids.  After all, children in Bethesda are expected to attend Brown, Cornell and Rutgers.

Meanwhile, the GAO has documented more the 6,000 cases of military recruiter irregularities, and military recruiters continue to be implicated in dozens of rape and drug cases involving vulnerable high school children. 

The Department of Defense is now spending close to $4 billion a year on military recruiting, and an increasing share of that money is earmarked to school-based recruiting.  In fact, the military's new guide for recruiters calls for "school ownership."   There are 6,600 recruiters for the active-duty Army alone, up by 22% in the last two years. The Army National Guard and Army Reserve also have beefed up their recruiting corps.  The pentagon has increased the maximum enlistment bonus from $20,000 to $40,000 and it is now paying soldiers a $1,000 bonus for referring every enlistee who completes boot camp.

But that's only part of the equation.  The Army is dramatically lowering the bar for enlisting.  The percent of all Army recruits without a high school diploma has risen to 18.8%, the highest level since 1981.  The Army has also relaxed the minimum scores necessary on the standardized Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT).  The percent of soldiers who have been granted waivers for alcohol or drug abuse, criminal misdemeanors, and various medical conditions has increased from 10% to 15% in the last five years.   Tattoos on the hands and neck are okay now.  The Southern Policy Law Center claims the Army is looking the other way while it admits large numbers of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  The Army has also increased its maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 42. 

To top it off, the Army has awarded a contract up to five years worth $1.35 billion to a new advertising agency, McCann Erickson, the firm that handles Microsoft's image.  We can expect more pressure on mom and dad and more of a presence in chat rooms and Internet sites popular with youth.

They're going after your kid and you're their biggest obstacle!  Won't you join us? 

There are several problems associated with the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps (JROTC) program that is offered in many of Montgomery's schools. Memorandum 50 from the US Army Recruiting Command makes it clear that the JROTC program is, in fact, a recruiting program, despite the military's claims to the contrary: click here.

All teachers in Montgomery County schools must hold at least a Bachelor's degree and have Maryland Certification.  The county also requires teachers to earn their Masters' degrees, and 81% of Montgomery County teachers have done so.   JROTC instructors, on the other hand, need only possess a GED and they may teach for-credit courses in all four grades.  All that is required of them is that they "have the mentality, personality, appearance, and bearing to represent the Army well in the civilian community."  (See p. 2-1, JROTC certification standards.) 

There is little or no curricular oversight exercised over the JROTC program in the schools and this is alarming!  What are these GED-educated military personnel teaching our children?    

The citizenship sections of the JROTC texts portray citizenship as being primarily achieved through military service, provide only a short discussion of civil rights, and downplay the importance of civilian control of the military.  By contrast, the National Textbook Company civics text, in use in Montgomery County, treats political participation as citizenship's defining feature and describes the Constitution's framers' intent to control the power of the military by making a civilian the commander of the armed forces.  Historical events presented in the JROTC curriculum are distorted by the omission of certain facts and/or perspectives, compared to standard history texts in use in Montgomery County. History is described as a linear series of accomplishments by soldiers, while the progress engendered by regular citizens is marginalized. America's wars are treated as having been inevitable.

While it claims to provide leadership training with broad relevance, in fact, the JROTC curriculum defines leadership as respect for constituted authority and the chain of command, rather than as critical thinking and democratic consensus-building, and it consistently conflates leadership and followership. Finally, the text encourages the reader to rely uncritically on the military as a source of self-esteem and guidance.

JROTC's militarism runs counter to MCPS-based initiatives like Violence Prevention Week that encourage students to settle disputes nonviolently.  At a time when schools across the country are employing a variety of methods -- from metal detectors to peer conflict mediation -- to curb incidents of violence in the schools, create safe learning environments, and teach peaceful means of conflict resolution, JROTC's introduction of weapons training, its partnership with the NRA to sponsor marksmanship matches, and its modeling of militaristic solutions to problems contradict the schools' stated opposition to violence.