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JROTC on Life Support in San Francisco
Parents are fighting to keep the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps alive in the Golden Gate City.
Arch-liberal San Francisco will vote next month on whether to retain Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps classes. JROTC may just win.
In 2006, the school board voted to end the 90-year-old program, which enrolled 1,600 students at seven high schools. Trustee Mark Sanchez argued that JROTC recruits students to join the military, where gays face the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy.” Unable to come up with an alternative leadership program, the board extended the death date to June, 2009. But they drove two-thirds of cadets out of JROTC by voting this summer to deny PE credit and transfer ninth graders to other classes. The abrupt move cost the district $1 million to hire new teachers, while still paying half the salaries of JROTC instructors.
JROTC students, alumni, and parents qualified Proposition V, an advisory measure asking the school board to retain JROTC, and it will be on the ballot for the November election. Mayor Gavin Newsom, worried about the city’s anti-military image, has endorsed V, along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a former mayor. More surprisingly, so has the city’s gay American Legion post and several gay/lesbian student groups. Asian voters are expected to favor JROTC, which predominantly attracts Asian students. The teachers’ union is neutral.
Choice for Students, the pro-V campaign, says JROTC instructors don’t recruit. If they do, they’re doing a lousy job: nearly all JROTC participants graduate and go on to college while only three to five percent enter the military. Non-JROTC students, who are less likely to go to college, are more likely to enlist, says Nelson Lum of Choice for Students.
San Francisco cadets “ask” and “tell” all they want. Gay and bisexual cadets told the school board that JROTC is a safe place to come out. Openly gay students regularly hold top leadership posts. JROTC attracts students who want to learn discipline, work as a team, rise to leadership roles, and volunteer for community service projects. They compete on drill teams, play on drum squads, and go on field trips. Those who participate for three or four years — most do not — run school activities and classes.
Over and over again, JROTC cadets say it creates a sense of “family,” that it gives them a place to be after school, that it gives them a reason to show up every day. JROTC attracts students who want the camaraderie and discipline of sports, but aren’t able to make a team, says Johnny Wang, campaign director for Proposition V. Half the cadets — and most of the leaders — are female.
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Joanne Jacobs is the author of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds. She blogs on education at JoanneJacobs.com.
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20 Comments
1. Marc Malone:Of course San Fran wants to stop JROTC. It’s the beginning of discipline and of taking responsibility for oneself. Next thing you know, they’ll grow up to be conservatives. Can’t have any of that.
Myself, I took it to get my PE credits. I was too small, skiny, and underfed to indulge in any regular PE classes. (We were really dirt-poor.) Next thing you know, I was in the military and voting for Reagan.
Oct 14, 2008 - 2:49 am 2. JROTC on Life Support in San Francisco | PoliticsMuch.com:[...] orginally posted at PajamasMedia.com. We claim no responsibility for this content. Please click on the link above to read and comment on [...]
Oct 14, 2008 - 5:52 am 3. Shawn Dain:I took JROTC for 4 years in high school and was eventually Batallion Commander. My senior year we scored the only perfect score in school history. I spent 3 summers at Ft. Jackson at the JROTC summer program, participated in 30 military funerals, white water rafted, went caving, repelled, did hundreds of hours of community activities, skied, went to the beach, toured the Pentagon, flew in choppers, and met my US Senator, all while in JROTC. Had it not been for that great program I would have missed many oportunities to travel and experience new things at a young age. Following high school only one of my command staff joined the military and he’s now an airborne ranger. The rest of us have used our JROTC skills to better ourselves in civilian life. At our 10 year reunion a few years ago all the JROTC kids enjoyed re-telling old stories, and we took a group photo w/ just us. The Football team or band didn’t do that, only JROTC, a group that still felt tightly linked even after 10 years apart. It’s sad that San Fran would let PC get in the way of teaching young people to take pride in themselves and their community, even if that community is nuts. The goal of JROTC is “TO MOTIVATE YOUNG PEOPLE TO BE BETTER AMERICANS”. Too bad there are people today who think being a better American is a bad thing.
Oct 14, 2008 - 8:38 am 4. Mike T:Behavior like this really makes one have to question why these hotbeds of anti-American politics get any real support from the rest of the country. It would be appropriate to see the federal government issue a blanket ban on awarding defense contracts and other defense-related activities in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles where such behavior by school boards is tolerated.
Oct 14, 2008 - 8:55 am 5. AJ:They should not received federal funding, period.
Having been to SF many times, I can tell you it’s a beautiful city but the people there are horrible human beings.
Oct 14, 2008 - 9:13 am 6. Darren:I hate to paint with such a broad brush, but for the most part I have to agree with AJ’s 2nd sentence.
Oct 14, 2008 - 10:53 am 7. James Chen:Joanne,
JROTC in SF, like much of the San Francisco public school system, consists largely of Asian students. Most, if not all, of the anti-JROTC activists, are whites whose children attend private schools. These enlightened white liberals would never think of sending their lily-white children to those “yellow” schools, with JROTC or not.
So the issue is not whether children of the anti-JROTC will have access to JROTC classes. Rather, it is whether an ethnic, immigrant group that is less responsive to liberal brainwashing will have access to an environment free of liberal brainwashing–namely, the JROTC curriculum.
Thanks for listening.
Oct 14, 2008 - 10:54 am 8. Jeff Weimer:The San Francisco area used to be much more pro-military 20 years ago when I was stioned there in the Navy. They still were quite liberal at the same time, after all, gay-friendliness, Haight-Ashbury, and Berkeley were all long-established by that time. They just seemed to counterbalance each other. The Navy alone had the Naval Shipyard, Alameda Naval Air Station, Mare Island, Treasure Island, and the Concord Naval Weapons Station. It was one of the three major naval complexes on the west coast. All of those installations are now gone, victims of the mid ’90s BRAC (mostly due to the extremely high cost of living in the bay area). San Francisco was then, a truly egalitarian place. You could be who you were with little or no molestation – it’s nothing like that now. This JROTC issue is another sign of that. After the military left, the Left has been systematically trying to remove all vestiges of it everywhere – witness the protests at the Berkeley Marine Officer Recruiting Station.
JROTC, Civil Air Patrol, Police Explorers, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Sea Cadets (MY group) and other in and out of school related youth activities are primarily citizenship endeavors, promoting a love of country and teaching self-discipline and a sense of belonging. That some may (as in my case) lead to enlistment an/or a career in the military is not a bad thing. It doesn’t promote militarism (most of us don’t WANT to go to war – it’s our lives on the line after all!) but it does instill a love of country and a willingness to support and defend it not found in many other areas of our culture.
Oct 14, 2008 - 11:55 am 9. rocketeer:Ethnic studies and peer resources as an alternative to JROTC? These people are a joke. The left-wing gay-mafia has turned a once beautiful city into a cesspool, and this is just another outward example of it. They’re not going to be happy until the city is one big bathhouse. I hope they’re happy with their sanctuary city illegal alien problems, their homeless on every doorstep problems, and their IV drug users leaving needles at all the playgrounds. I’m done with that city and will never set foot in it again, nor spend one thin dime there. I’m praying for an 8.0 on the richter scale to slide it out to sea.
Oct 14, 2008 - 12:46 pm 10. Diggs:I’m just happy to see that grownups in the Bay area are scared of children.
Oct 14, 2008 - 1:30 pm 11. GM Roper:Having been to SF many times I’d agree with AJ but I also am a member of the 911Neocons forum started by <a href=”http://www.cinnamonstillwell.blogspot.com/”Cinnamon Stillwell, a Pajamas Media Blogger. She, and the many others in SF that are active in the forum are absolutely terrific people.
Oct 14, 2008 - 1:54 pm 12. SFC B:Of course they’re scared of children. Any good totaltarian government requires the children to rat out the parents. Just because the SF city council wants to implement such a one-thought state doesn’t mean they want it to adversely affect themselves.
Oct 14, 2008 - 1:54 pm 13. GM Roper:Having been to SF many times I’d agree with AJ but I also am a member of the 911Neocons forum started by Cinnamon Stillwell, a Pajamas Media Blogger. She, and the many others in SF that are active in the forum are absolutely terrific people.
Oct 14, 2008 - 1:55 pm 14. JoeS:I teach at an inner-city high school with a very active, very successful ROTC program. The state board of ed is hiding behind “the obesity epidemic.”
This is totally false. ROTC has offered to meet any standard that will be enforced across the board on all students. The obese kids are in the regular PE classes where obese ex-athletes (you can’t call them “teachers,” they don’t teach)kick out the balls and let anyone who feels like it to play a game.
The democrat party is willing to harm inner-city children in their quest to hurt the military. I hope the Pentagon starts pulling defense projects out of CA. The C-17 in Long Beach would be a great place to start. DiFi and Boxer, Loretta and Linda Sanchez, Laura Richardson (with three foreclosed homes) all hate the military. The unions in CA add millions to the cost of each plane. Move the production to Arizona or Texas.
SF Schools would rather take 1st graders to a same sex marriage than allow kids to choose ROTC. This is Nancy Pelosi’s hometown. Imagine Pelosi, Harry Reed, and Obama running the country.
Oct 14, 2008 - 2:05 pm 15. SinisterBill:James Chen,
I’m a white San Franciscan and sending my daughter to private school has nothing to do with Asians and everything to do with the incompetent school system. having said that, I don’t think this is going to pass. I think the schools really thought the public would line up behind them just because it’s anti-military. Newsom didn’t get behind this until well after polls showed the public wasn’t going to march in lock step. We have our problems, but after election day this isn’t going to be one of them.
Oct 14, 2008 - 2:13 pm 16. furious:Lived in the Bay Area for eighteen years, and SFO (Outer Richmond and Outer Sunset) for fifteen. Some people (Medea Benjamin, Gavin Newsome, most of the City Supervisors, BlackBloc Anarchists, etc.) were perfectly awful people. OTOH My parish congregation, the shopkeepers and restauranteurs (especially the immigrants), the GG Park landscapers, even the MUNI drivers (!!), were absolutely wonderful people and made living in the City a pleasure. Amazing how far “hello”, “the chow fun was delicious”, and “thanks for the ride” will go towards making friends of perfect strangers.
That being said, antics like driving out ROTC of the schools are one of the reasons that families are leaving San Francisco, enrollments are dropping, and public schools are closing or consolidating. It’s a shame, but San Francisco is not a child-friendly city and not someplace I wanted to raise my daughter.
Oct 14, 2008 - 3:38 pm 17. James Chen:SinsterBill,
Enrollment at SF upper-tier public schools (Lowell, Lincoln, etc.) are based largely on entrance exam scores. However, Asian enrollments are limited at these schools, via illegal quotas, to around 67% of the school population. The remaining slots are allocated to other ethnic groups, with lower entrance standards for all the non-Asian students. For example, a middling white student would have little difficulty getting into Lowell High School, the top SF public high school, but an Asian student with similar test scores might be sent packing to a lower-tier school (Galileo, Mission, etc.). Yet despite their racially-engineered student bodies, the upper-tier of SF public schools are still among the highest performing schools in California.
Even so, white liberals appear to have reservations with sending their children to high-performing SF public schools. Barely 1 in 7 students at Lowell High School are white in a city that is 45% white. Quite simply, this is a classic case of “white flight”, but with a twist.
The few conservative white parents in SF (emphasis on “few”) that I know would not hesitate to send their children to high-performing SF public schools. It’s the white, mostly liberal parents in the SF who fear sending their children to those “yellow” schools. Why? Quite simply, their kids would be blown away academically by the children of immigrant parents from East Asia–how embarassing! And that is why there are virtually no whites left in the SF public school system.
Joanne Jacobs’ fine blog has a recent entry entitled: “In U.S., math is for nerds — and Asians”. It explains much… (http://joannejacobs.com/2008/10/10/in-us-math-is-for-nerds-and-asians/)
Thanks for listening.
Oct 14, 2008 - 4:48 pm 18. sonya:NEW YORK –Sen. Barack Obama, with a donation of nearly $1 million, and a son of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi were among the biggest contributors to the presidential campaign of controversial Kenyan leader Raila Odinga, according to an internal document obtained by WND.
The memo was prepared by the head of Odinga’s campaign finance accounting section, Shakeel Shabbir, as an official report delivered to the national treasurer for Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement party, or ODM.
Among the 72 individuals and organizations that contributed money to Odinga’s 2007 presidential run in Kenya, Shabbir lists “Friends of Senator B.O.” as having donated 66,000,000 Kenyan schillings, about $950,000.
Saif el-Islam Gadhafi, the Libyan strongman’s second oldest son, reportedly donated 53,450,000 Kenyan schillings, about $765,000.
According to several highly credible ex-ODM sources WND interviewed in Kenya, the $950,000 raised for Odinga’s campaign came from a series of private meetings arranged for Odinga by Mark Lippert, a foreign policy adviser in Obama’s U.S. Senate office. The meetings with top-dollar Obama fundraisers and donors took place during Odinga’s 2006 trip to the U.S. In Kenya, WND talked to several top ex-ODM officials who played key roles in Odinga’s 2007 presidential campaign.
The officials became disaffected with Odinga after confirming he signed a memorandum of understanding with Sheik Abdullahi Abdi, the chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, or NAMLEF. In the Aug, 27, 2007, agreement, Odinga promised that within six months of becoming president, he would “rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Shariah as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Quran for Muslim declared religions.”
The ex-Odinga officials also told WND that, as Christians, they were appalled to see Odinga use tribal violence as a strategy to gain power after he lost the election by some 250,000 votes to sitting President Mwai Kibaki, a member of Kenya’s majority Kikuyu tribe.
Odinga called on fellow Luo tribal members to protest alleged voter fraud, resulting in a brutal wave of machete-wielding violence that killed an estimated 1,000 members of the Kikuyu tribe in January and February. Some 800 Christian churches also were destroyed or burned to the ground, without a single mosque being damaged.
Oct 15, 2008 - 7:44 am 19. RiverRat66:Diggs’ comment cracks me up! Don’t know why “Sandy’s” comment is in this, but anyway…I had an ‘edge’ in high school and one semester of ROTC straightened me out. I did enjoy the teamwork, discipline and camaraderie and stayed for another 1.5 semesters. That experience helped me in the Navy and later in the business world. We need good leaders of all types and in all professions. Thank goodness we have some willing to give back to our country by serving it in this capacity. Good Luck to you Prop V supporters! It is an ELECTIVE so I don’t understand why there’s such a problem.
Oct 17, 2008 - 12:35 pm 20. RiverRat66:CORRECTION: Meant to say “Sonya” not “Sandy
Oct 17, 2008 - 12:36 pm