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Taking Back Our Schools

By Jim Murphy

"Taking Back Our Schools" was a full-day workshop and teach-in centered on community education on the issues of counter-recruiting and the presence of the military in our public schools. It was presented as a two-part event on the same day, September 9, 2006, at West Side High School in New York City. The morning session was for veterans only, focusing on how to present our personal stories to high-school students within a classroom or assembly setting. This session was attended by twenty-five veterans spanning World War II to the Iraq War. A training DVD that shows two veterans doing this kind of presentation is ready for distribution and will be distributed to chapters of VVAW and Veterans for Peace upon request. We focused on how we tell our story while continually interjecting the improbable truths that are currently discussed by military recruiters in their schools. Given that we generally work within forty- to fifty-minute time periods, we realize that we have to be concise and thorough, all at the same time. Our favorite presentations are when we debate recruiters before high school assemblies. During the past semester, we reached over 15,000 students in over sixty high schools. We are both retired teachers, so we know how to work a classroom and how to keep students' attention. The DVD models specific strategies.

The afternoon session was geared to networking community groups, teacher-student teams, and parents with veterans. We discussed legal rights, how to approach high-school administrators to get veterans who are counter-recruiters in their schools as presenters, and how to implement opt-out letters in the public schools. We purposely didn't over-structure this session, hoping for more cross-dialogue between the several groups that were present, which included borough and neighborhood groups (Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn), unions, educators (NYCORE), veterans, and our friends from Code Pink. After discussing our approaches to leading class discussions on enlisting in the military, each group made a short presentation, telling who they were, the materials they used, and their ideas about how to alter our approaches to fighting the current, well-financed campaign to entice kids to go into the military services. The rest was about eating and schmoozing!

For more information, visit New York Veterans Speak Out: www.veteransforpeaceny.org/vfpnyvso.htm