April 20, 2006

By ROSETTE ROYALE
Staff Reporter

Here’s the text of a recently declassified communiqué from Seattle voters to military recruiters: keep your war-mongering claws off our kids.

Okay, perhaps that’s hyperbole. But that sentiment — of keeping our city’s youth out of the grasp of the armed services — is the underlying message behind a potential November ballot initiative opposing military recruiters’ access to public schools, colleges, universities, and parks. The initiative, named, fortuitously enough, I-86, enjoyed an official kick-off on April 13 in a classroom of Seattle Central Community College filled with anti-recruitment activists.

“ This is a new city-wide initiative that will put Seattle on the map,” said Kate Johnson, steering committee member of the College Not Combat Coalition, lead sponsor of I-86.

Johnson spoke these words, not in front of a map, but a screen bearing the ever-escalating price tag of the war in Iraq. As the April 13 total nudged up to $272.9 billion, she put those costs in perspective. That same amount, said Johnson, would pay for four million additional public school teachers to receive a union salary of $50,000, or send 13 million students to a four-year state university for a year. Such military expenditures represent an assault on education, noted Johnson, demanding that voters take action. “Ordinary people can do something,” she said, “by joining College Not Combat.”

But joining the group won’t put the initiative on the ballot: only the signatures of 17,000 legal voters will. The deadline for signatures to be collected is August 1.

Those who agree to support the initiative, however, would be asking for more than just having recruiters expelled from the city’s campuses. They would be telling the city to investigate and advocate ways in which high school graduates could pursue secondary education without relying upon financial assistance from the military. The initiative explicitly states such advocacy would include “the possibility of extending free, public education for two years beyond high school.” How those funds are to be procured is not specified.

What has become specific, however, is a judicial ruling on the presence of military recruiters on campuses. In mid-March, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision that forces colleges and universities who receive federal assistance to permit recruiters access to students on campus. (The federal goverment, for example, supplies Seattle Central with close to $6 million a year.) A consortium of law schools had challenged the federal law, known as the Solomon Amendment, on the grounds that granting the military an open door compelled the hosting colleges and universities to support the military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian service members.

Speaking shortly after Johnson was Ragina Johnson (no relation), campaign manager of San Francisco’s “College Not Combat” Proposition I, which told recruiters there they weren’t welcome in public schools. Ragina said that San Fransicoans sent a clear message to recruiters in 2005, when 60 percent of voters passed the initiative. Anti-recruitment efforts, she said, were a strategic maneuver to exploit the weakness of the current U.S. administration, as well as to keep students’ hands and consciences clean. “We say [students] deserve access to education and jobs without killing people in war,” Ragina said, to much applause.

Applause greeted Green Party senatorial candidate Aaron Dixon as well. Dixon recalled for the audience discussions he’d had in the past with his son, who, after high school, joined the Navy. Shortly after his son’s enlisting, the Gulf War began. Luckily, Dixon said, his son was discharged before seeing action. But the recent sight of a man standing alongside an interstate exit with a sign announcing he was a “Gulf War Veteran,” reminded Dixon of the after-effects of war faced by veterans, oftentimes without assistance from the government they served. Instances like these, he said, led Dixon to frown upon the military’s pursuit of students.

“ The military doesn’t care about young people,” said Dixon. “They’re cannon-fodder to them.”

Amy Hagopian, president of the Garfield High School Parent/Teacher/Student Association, said that voter support of initiatives such as I-86 was more than mere symbolism. Tiny acts of civil disobedience are important, Hagopian said, referring to those who staged sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement. “Was that toothless?” she asked.

Students throughout the city, she said, were voluntarily opting out of being solicited by recruiters, with 40 percent of Garfield students falling in that camp. The mission of the PTSA and the reason she was on hand to support I-86, she continued, was to work to keep young people safe. Such actions, she knew, went against the general perception of the PTSA.

“ The mission of the PTSA,” Hagopian said, smiling, “is not to have bake sales.” n