[R-G] Students shield themselves from the military recruiters in their midst

[Richard Menec]

>>For the military, recruiting is a $4 billion industry overseen by teams of 
>>market researchers, advertising agencies and recruiters, all working 
>>furiously to find willing bodies to fill empty boots on the ground. 
>>According to army spokesman Douglas Smith, the military spent an average 
>>of $16,199 for each of its 73,373 individual recruits in 2005. That's 
>>nearly $5,000 more than what the city spent on education per student in 
>>2004 . Yes, that's right: The country can spend more to recruit a child 
>>for the military in a given year than to educate her.<<
=========
http://nypress.com/20/26/news%26columns/feature.cfm

THE RE-MILITARIED ZONE
Students shield themselves from the military recruiters in their midst

By Jill Colvin

It's late in the afternoon at Norman Thomas High School, an orange- bricked 
high rise that stands awkwardly off of Park Avenue on Manhattan's East Side. 
Despite the golden letters on the building's face, it's hard to tell this is 
a school.

More police and security guards enter and exit through the building's doors 
than do students; an NYPD police van sits outside. Within minutes of my 
arrival, I'm approached by men in badged uniforms questioning my presence. 
Inside, students must pass through metal detectors to get to class. It 
already feels like a combat zone.

Further uptown, days before classes end for the summer, Jamal Sanders, 17, 
cool and assured, stands with a group of friends, hanging out on the street 
in front of A. Philip Randolph Campus High School in West Harlem, where 
thick iron bars wrap around windows and security guards quietly enter and 
exit the building, patrolling the block. For Jamal, like most high school 
students in the city who don't have a close friend or relative serving 
overseas, the war in Iraq is a distant reality, though one that has brewed 
quietly in the background throughout the entirety of his high school career. 
This month, the first high school class that grew up on the Iraq War 
graduate; this is the 9/11-generation come of age.

But at times, the war gives rise to battles of a different sort: the clash 
in cafeterias and counseling offices between military and 
counter-recruitment activists over access to the city's schools and the 
tactics recruiters use to entice students too young to drink legally but old 
enough to enlist for war. In recent years, peace activists, parents and 
students have joined together with groups like the New York Civil Liberties 
Union (NYCLU) to stage their own counter- insurgency against what they 
describe as the military's use of heavy- handed tactics that go well beyond 
the appropriate means of conduct. They accuse the military of harassing 
students, manipulating them with lies and slick marketing, and 
disproportionately targeting low income students and students of color.

Jamal and his friends complain of constant bombardment by military 
recruiters, whom they report are a common fixture in the school's hallways 
and counseling offices. "They be up in the school. We try to get away from 
them," he described, earning a chorus of nods from his friends. Eleventh 
grader Jordan Smith, also 17, agreed. "They just don't give up," he said. 
"You get away from one person, and then you get another one." According to 
Jordan, recruiters often pressure students by telling them again and again 
that the military is the best or only way to pay for an education. "That 
type of stuff gets me mad," he said.

But whether the experiences of these students are widespread is hard to say. 
While Jamal and Jordan estimated that there are about four to six military 
recruiters operating in the school in any given week, other students at A. 
Philip Randolph said that the number is really much lower and that 
recruiters aren't much of a problem. "They don't bother nobody," several 
sophomores and juniors, including Laishante Taylor, 17, agreed. Others said 
that recruiters tended to remain outside of the school, soliciting students 
on nearby street corners. Eleventh grader Devon, a fast-talking 17-year-old 
still awaiting a final growth spurt, assured that recruiters "only stop 
tough guys," so he and his friends had nothing to worry about.

The experiences of students also vary greatly from one school to the next. 
Principals and teachers have significant discretion in deciding how much 
access they want to give recruiters. Some are very welcoming, inviting Army, 
Air Force, Marine and Navy recruiters into schools warmly and frequently; 
still others, military officials and recruiters say, do their best to bar 
recruiters completely, or relegate them to twice-annual appearances at large 
career fairs-the minimum required by federal law. According to both the No 
Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the National Defense Authorization Act for 
the Fiscal Year 2002, schools are required to give military recruiters the 
"same access" to students as they give to other educational institutions and 
perspective employers-nothing more and nothing else.

According to one sergeant, a Marine recruiter and member of the U.S. Marine 
Corps, who asked that his name not be printed, said the situation has 
changed substantially since the war began, with parents and teachers 
increasingly resistant to giving recruiters school access. The Marine, who 
now spends his afternoons standing in full uniform with three or four others 
on busy Midtown intersections, said the military faced a similar situation 
back during Desert Storm and Vietnam. "It all just depends on the time," he 
said. "It's real, and kids are taking casualties. If there was no war going 
on, the teachers wouldn't have a problem." As for interacting with kids, he 
says, "we only see them maybe now and then."

But local anti-recruiting activist groups like Youth Activists-Youth Allies 
(Ya-Ya) and the NYCLU report that military recruiters have not been 
dissuaded by opposition to the war, and still get far more access to 
students than other organizations. Amy Wagner, Executive Director of the 
Ya-Ya Network, a non-profit, city-wide child advocacy organization composed 
primarily of high school students and recent graduates of color, described 
how recruiters at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens to Dewitt 
Clinton High School in the Bronx show up in big, flashy vans, blaring music 
to attract interest. It's almost like drug dealers-showing their bling to 
impress and recruit- except instead of narcotics, they're pushing service to 
country. At Bryant, she said, recruiters set up obstacle courses in the gym, 
taking over regularly scheduled classes, which isn't allowed. Students can 
participate for a simple fee: turning over their personal contact 
information to recruiters.

While distractions from class time and information gathering are 
problematic, Wagner said that the organization tends to receive the most 
complaints from students "who get harassed walking down the halls." She 
described one former employee who had very long dreadlocks. "He said that 
several times a week, the recruiter would grab him by the dreadlocks and 
say, 'So when are you going to cut those off and come join the military?' He 
found that incredibly offensive." The presence in hallways is augmented by 
other contact points, such as subway stations near schools and, of course, 
calls at home. One marine recruiter we spoke with said that it isn't 
atypical for a potential enlistee to be called multiple times a day, every 
day, to keep tabs on any potential changes in intention. That's a lot more 
than any potential college or employer is willing to do.

School Ownership is the Goal

For the military, recruiting is a $4 billion industry overseen by teams of 
market researchers, advertising agencies and recruiters, all working 
furiously to find willing bodies to fill empty boots on the ground. 
According to army spokesman Douglas Smith, the military spent an average of 
$16,199 for each of its 73,373 individual recruits in 2005. That's nearly 
$5,000 more than what the city spent on education per student in 2004 . Yes, 
that's right: The country can spend more to recruit a child for the military 
in a given year than to educate her.

Interestingly, statistics show that the number of accessions (military-speak 
for people who actually shipped to training) who were in high school at the 
time of enlistment has been declining since long before the war in Iraq, not 
only in raw numbers, but as a percentage of total recruits. In 2000, 19,044 
accessions were high school seniors. That number had dropped to 11,302 in 
2004, and stood at just 9,772 in 2006. That means that only about 10 percent 
of accessions last year signed their contracts while in high school, raising 
questions about whether results justify the military's effort. According to 
the New York City Department of Education's Division of Assessment and 
Accountability survey on the post-high school plans of 2005 graduates, only 
1.2 percent planned to join the military services, while 63 percent planned 
to attend either a two or four-year-college.

"The focus on high school has changed over the past decade, with so many 
young people now wanting to go to college" explained S. Douglas Smith, 
Department of the Army Civilian Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Army 
Recruiting Command in Fort Knox. "As a result, young men and women may see 
the army as a barrier." In response, Smith said that the military does not 
concentrate as much on high school juniors and seniors as it did back in the 
1980s or '90s. "Now, we talk to the older age groups that may have stepped 
out."

However, The School Recruiting Program Handbook, printed in 2004 by United 
States Army Recruiting Command,  tells a very different story. The handbook, 
designed as a guide outlining regulatory requirements as well as successful 
recruiting techniques, begins with the following iterative: "School 
ownership is the goal." Recruiters are advised that they must "ensure total 
market penetration" with "an army presence in all secondary schools."  The 
guide also advises recruiters to become as involved in school communities as 
possible, participating in social events and volunteering their service in 
order to make themselves indispensable. They are even told to always carry 
gifts to give administrators-from pens to mugs to donuts-to establish good 
will.

A 2004 Boston Globe article, which was among the first to introduce the 
public to the manual, reported that "officers are trained to analyze 
students and make a pitch according to what will strike a motivational 
chord." Throughout the book, the army is described as a "product which can 
be sold" using an "effective sales approach." Recruiters are even told to 
prepare themselves so that they will be ready to act if a high school senior 
experiences an unexpected disappointment, like not getting a job or being 
denied scholarship money to go to colllege. Education incentives should be 
pushed, it states, "to encourage college-capable individuals to defer their 
college until they have served in the army."

Many counter-recruiters also accuse the military of making promises to 
students that are either exaggerations of the truth-or outright falsehoods. 
In an effort to set students straight about these so- called "military 
myths," the Ya-Yas run information workshops and distribute fliers that 
include statistics about how much money recruits actually receive towards 
school following service. Fewer than half of enrollees who pay into the GI 
bill actually receive any money at all, they say, due to individuals' 
non-completion of full enlistment contracts or because of disqualifications 
for receiving a "general discharge under honorable circumstance" instead of 
an "honorable discharge" for things like not paying child support, talking 
openly about being gay or not meeting weight requirements. In addition, the 
organization distributes information about high rates of racism and rape in 
the military, as well as information about the high levels of unemployment, 
disability and homelessness among former enlistees.

"I just think that there's a lack of education of young people about what's 
going on," Jessica Rivere, a current Ya-Ya member who graduated from Francis 
Lewis High School in Fresh Meadows, Queens in 2005, complained. "And I think 
that many students-including myself at the time-we didn't know much about 
what was going on. And thinking about what military recruiters promise young 
people-they're basically lying. And that is a problem. If they were 
targeting these neighborhoods and fulfilling all that they say they're going 
to do and give, then me personally, I don't think I'll have as much a 
problem with it," she explained. "But that's not what they're doing."

Christine Feliciano, a current Ya-Ya member who has just graduated from 
Christopher Columbus High in the Bronx, said that the war was also rarely 
mentioned by recruiters, who told students that their chances of being 
deployed overseas were slim. "They didn't want to talk a lot about the war," 
Christine said. "When people would ask, they're like, 'No, I don't know. 
There's a slight chance, but it's likely you'll just be, you know, running 
computers or something.'" That simply isn't the case.

Arms Race Counter-recruiters also charge that the military is unequally 
targeting a particular demographic: minority students who come from 
low-income communities. Statistics show that while nationwide the majority 
of recruits are white-often coming from poor, rural areas across the 
country-the case is reversed in NYC. Here, recruits are much more likely to 
be African American or Hispanic than white. "In New York, it is clearly 
youth of color being targeted," Wagner said with certainty.

But that's a difficult charge to prove, especially in NYC, where, at the 
vast majority of public high schools, white students are in the minority and 
students are overwhelmingly poor. In 2005, the year of the most recently 
published statistics, only 14 percent of public high school students in the 
city were white, versus 35 percent black and 37 percent Hispanic. And over 
half of those students qualified as eligible for free lunches-often used as 
an indicator of poverty. Evidence that recruiters specifically target 
minority-heavy and low- income schools has, until now, been for the most 
part anecdotal, relying mainly on the observations of advocate groups and 
students. According to Ari Rosmarin, Field Organizer at the NYCLU, the 
organization "has recently obtained recruiter school reports from many areas 
in New York that helps to illustrate the way that the military prioritizes 
its recruiting targets" through a Freedom of Information Act request over a 
year ago. But to bolster their case, the "Students or Soldiers?" 
coalition-which includes the NYCLU, NYCORE and Ya-Ya-has teamed up with the 
Manhattan Borough President's Office to conduct a survey investigating the 
issue as part of its Project on Military Recruitment and Students' Rights.

While the coalition is still processing the data, Wagner said that some 
trends have begun to stand out. "From what we've found from unofficial spot 
polling and from the data that's available on the Board of Education 
website, it looks as though schools with large immigrant populations are 
heavily targeted." She also said the data show that recruiters tend to 
target larger, general schools and to stay away from magnet schools and 
smaller, specialty schools where kids are more likely to go to college.

But military officials deny all charges that they specifically target 
certain groups. "There are a lot of myths out there about who we recruit and 
where from," Smith explained. He says that recruiters simply can't afford to 
target specific populations. "Our goal is to reach as many potential 
candidates as possible. We could not possibly meet our mission by targeting 
limited communities," he said. "Our mission dictates that we focus on all 
potential schools, communities and populations. If we didn't, we'd be 
putting ourselves at a huge disadvantage in achieving recruitment numbers."

However, Smith did say that recruiters naturally spend more time at schools 
with larger populations, where there are more students to contact, as well 
as at schools that have been more "productive" in the past. "We're like any 
other business," Smith explained. "We're like McDonald's.[We're] trying to 
give each recruiter a population that is large enough to recruit from."

Emily Gockley, chief of advertising affairs for the NYC Recruiting 
battalion, echoed Smith's words. "Our recruiters are expected to visit all 
high schools and colleges in the area," she said, although the number sent 
to each school varies from station to station and school to school. Gockley 
also denied that the army specifically targets racial minorities or 
low-income communities. However, she did say that the military relies on 
"elaborate marketing segmentation analysis," which uses a database of zip 
codes and other demographic information to determine which schools have a 
higher propensity for enlistment. "All companies do it," Gockley assured. 
"Coca Cola, Ford. It's just like in corporate America. We look for a target 
market, just like Ford sells to a target market. Granted, we sell a 
lifestyle, not a product."

Gockley would not say precisely what types of demographic information are 
included or how the algorithm weighs certain factors. Nonetheless, she said 
that the military goes to extensive efforts to appeal to the demographic 
groups it believes it can most successfully recruit, and uses minority 
advertising to tailor messaging for Hispanic, African-American, Asian and 
Arab markets. "It only makes sense.Why would you want to give them a message 
that they're not going to listen to?" she asked. "The marketing guy provides 
the intelligence, just like the military. You want to find out where the 
enemy's at and concentrate your forces on attacking the same market." How 
exactly that differs from targeting minorities is hard to say.

Those who suspect profiling also site a second provision of the No Child 
Left Behind Act that requires all schools to provide the military with 11th 
and 12th grade students' names, home phone numbers and addresses-unless they 
formally "opt out" by signing a form. The Joint Advertising Marketing 
Research & Studies (JAMRS) database then stores this information, along with 
a student's racial and socioeconomic data, to share with local recruits. 
Critics ask again and again why, if race and class don't matter, the 
database would include such information.

The Re-Militarized Zone Students at targeted schools say that much of the 
problem is that, while recruiters may be present multiple times per 
week-often armed with flashy cars, cool activities and slick sales 
pitches-students are presented with few other options

"We don't ever see other recruiters," complained Michael Mollis, 16, an 11th 
grader at A. Philip Randolph. He believes that the military targets minority 
students "cuz most of them are struggling."

Jessica Rivere spent the beginning of her high school career as a Junior 
ROTC. She was most impressed at first, she said, by the prestige and status 
that came along with wearing the uniform. "You know, you see these young 
people looking sharp, with a bunch of ribbons, and you don't even know what 
you got them from, but it looks cool. And I was intrigued and I wanted to be 
a part of that, so I joined."

She enjoyed the physical and leadership training aspects of the program, but 
most of all, "it just meant that I was a part of something that most 
students weren't a part of."  When Jessica left JROTC during her senior 
year, she said she felt very isolated. "There wasn't a lot more going on in 
the school, you know, that students could feel a part of," she said. She 
blamed scheduling complications, caused by overcrowding at the school for 
making joining other clubs so difficult. "JROTC was one of the only programs 
that was scheduled in the school day, so you'll definitely be a part of 
something," she said.

Later, Jessica told me, "I don't think that the military recruiters should 
be in schools at a time when young people are trying to figure out for 
themselves what they want to do in life. When that's all they're getting, 
when colleges aren't reaching out to these neighborhoods and people of color 
in these schools and all their opportunities is just to go the Army, I think 
there's something wrong with that." She said that her mission is not only to 
kick military recruiters out of schools, but "also to encourage principles 
to outreach to these colleges and invite and give people different 
opportunities."

Wagner was particularly harsh on high schools for failing to help provide 
students with opportunities for the future. "Our schools are being 
militarized. Recruiters don't belong in schools. It lets too many schools 
off of their obligation to make sure that young people have post-high school 
plans," she said. She argued that the military presence provides an easy way 
out for school administrators who would otherwise be forced to find other 
options for children in their schools. "Many schools use the recruiter as a 
place to send the students they don't quite know what to do with," she said.

==============
***NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes.***
==============