SFWeekly Looks at the JROTC Issue

http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-04-08/news/jrotc-under-fire-in-s-f-schools/

Interesting article. Some Observations:

1) As I've posted before, I was a JROTC cadet in two different school districts. JROTC kids get teased/bullied everywhere. Yet it's only here that the program has tried to conform to self-styled "community standards". Despite this, it's still used as an ideological hate idol. I wonder whether the decision of the local JROTC program to water down their curricula helped them at all.

2) Any attempts to create a "homegrown" leadership program within SFUSD is doomed to failure. Any realistic attempt at a syllabus for such a program would have to include instruction on the use of discipline and motivation, and any such work outside the aegis of a neutral subject venue such as national defense or public safety will inevitably be labeled as ideological. We've already seen the interim "Leadership Pathway" project exposed as a sham.

3) Some people are just nuts about this. Apparently, a certain anti-JROTC School Board Commissioner "unfriended" one of her facebook freinds because that person had the temerity to post supportive comments about Fiona Ma's pro-JROTC legislation, on Ma's facebook wall. If I unfriended people based on policy decisions I'd have shit can FB Friends left.

4) I wonder if Army TRADOC (the national command which oversees JROTC) wouldn't rather see JROTC die at SFUSD in favor of a charter school or private military academy, either here or in Daly City. Lots of military secondary schools use the JROTC program as their curricula base. This may suit the facile political goals of the anti-JROTC School Board Commissioners, and the Army, but leave both the majority of SFUSD JROTC students as well as the peace activists with a great deal of resentment.

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