Recruiters on the Run
Counter recruitment movement wins victories nationwide
By Teresa Duran

On May 20, the high schools, colleges, and shopping malls of America were completely free of military recruiters. Instead, recruiters where huddled in their training centers for a "values stand down."

This unprecedented one-day retraining was essentially a public relations event, a response to growing public outrage at military recruiters' "improprieties" - coercive, high-pressure tactics and outright lies to convince youth to join the armed forces.

But instead of quieting public criticism, the May 20 "stand down" catapulted the movement against military recruitment into the public spotlight as never before. In the days following May 20, coordinated walkouts and protests erupted across the country, targeting military recruitment stations and forcing some to close down.

These protests were the high point of a counter-recruitment movement that has been bubbling up in high schools, colleges, and neighborhoods across the country over the last year.

Through protests and petitions, students and parents are demanding that military recruiters be kept out of our schools. In some areas, the counter-recruitment campaigns have brought working-class youth and youth of color - those targeted by military recruiters - into the forefront of the antiwar movement.

Free Speech in High Schools
Last fall in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, Youth Against War and Racism (YAWR) was established at Kennedy High School. The students began setting up a table against military recruiters whenever they showed up in their lunchroom. YAWR received so much support from fellow students that school administrators, under pressure from the American Legion, tried to ban them from tabling.

However, the students responded with the aid of hundreds of supporters who called the school in protest, and even organized a lunchroom press conference. The Kennedy High School administration had no choice but to back down.
The media coverage this victory created inspired the founding of more YAWR chapters in schools across the Twin Cities and throughout the country. When students at Foss High School in Tacoma, WA tried to launch a YAWR chapter, their principal made the same mistake as Kennedy's administrators by trying to shut down their first after-school meeting.

However, following an "unauthorized" after-school protest, and after thousands of people across the country put in calls to the Foss principal (including an offer from the Steelworkers union to send their members to Foss if needed!), the students were "allowed" to hold meetings and table against military recruiters in their school.

Opting Out
The No Child Left Behind Act requires every public school to release the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all high school juniors and seniors. This military recruitment rolodex has enraged students and parents across the country. What few parents know is that they can prevent these schools from releasing their children's contact information simply by writing to the school, referred to as "opting out."

In California and elsewhere, some school districts adopted "opt-in" policies, where students' private info was only given to the military if the students or parents asked for this. However, the Bush administration threatened to cut these schools off from federal funding, forcing them to overturn this reform. But many areas are still fighting.

In Santa Ana, a group of women have started organizing community-wide meetings to mobilize parents to opt their children out. Students in the Los Angeles area have held protests, made anti-recruitment documentaries, and formed organizations in their high schools to further their counter-recruitment campaigns (LA Times, 8/7/05).

In New York, branches of Youth Activists-Youth Allies have sprung up at many local high schools and are fighting back. They canvas their neighborhoods to raise the profile of counter-recruitment campaigns and hold workshops for fellow students to tell them the truth about life in the military (New York Amsterdam News, 2/24/05).

These examples are a sampling of the counter-recruitment campaigns which are emerging as the cutting edge of the antiwar movement