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Company commander Vickie Chung looks out at her fifth-period class from a lectern while Bullard observes from a back desk. The program's slogan, "To Motivate Young People to Be Better Citizens," stretches out on the wall above her head.
"I'm pretty sure everyone here wants to go to college," the 17-year-old senior says. "Lowell has a reputation. Most of you will probably go to four-year colleges."
"Why do you say that?" one student asks.
"Some of you may go to city or states," she concedes, "but most of you are aiming for higher education."
With no more questions, Chung assigns the students to brainstorm six colleges they want to attend for homework. Part of the career unit in the national JROTC curriculum includes a lesson on military careers, but she skipped it: "I thought it would be weird to focus on just one career." Bullard had no problem with that.
Chief in the opponents' case against JROTC is that the program is a recruiting tactic, a practice the school board banned on district campuses in 1991, until the federal No Child Left Behind Act a decade later mandated that the military must be granted the same access to students as other postgraduate options.
The opposition points to congressional testimony that a high percentage of JROTC graduates eventually join the armed services nationwide: 40 percent, according to a House Armed Services Committee report in 1999. Yet in San Francisco, the numbers aren't nearly that high. In a 2007 survey of 848 JROTC students, 16 percent indicated an interest in a military career. While the district doesn't track students after graduation, JROTC instructors say, anecdotally, only 2 to 3 percent of graduating seniors enlist directly after high school, while more than 90 percent attend college. "The Army has to decide if it wants to continue funding a program that's not helping its recruiting numbers," Bullard says. If you count the kids who've won congressional appointments to the United States Military Academy at West Point or ROTC scholarships, he estimates 6 percent of JROTC graduates from Lowell have joined the military in the 12 years he's taught there, the highest number in the city.
Some military critics don't care how many kids are enlisting. "If you're more successful in one school district than another, you're still a recruiter," says Dan Kelly, the former school board member who introduced the resolution to eliminate JROTC in 2006. "They know they're in San Francisco and that would be a very unpopular thing to say."
The program maintains in its promotional materials and its national curriculum that the program is not a recruiting tool. "Certainly we do have young people that take a look at what military service offers, and make that choice," Cadet Command spokesman Kotakis says. "And we're delighted about it. But we're also delighted if they move into positions in the private sector, and continue onto college. We don't track it." The San Francisco JROTC instructors' view on sending kids into the military is anything but gung-ho: "I would feel like an idiot if they wanted to be like me, make the choice I did 30 years ago, and go off to Iraq and get killed," says instructor Steve Hardee at Galileo.
Vickie Chung has fought the program's association with the military firsthand. She signed up for JROTC in eighth grade, knowing she would have to wage a battle for the heart and mind of her pacifist mother, who had forced Chung's older brother to transfer out of Galileo eight years earlier where he was a freshman JROTC cadet, and told Vickie: "I don't want you to go to Iraq and die."
Chung credits JROTC with changing her — but not into a warrior. She says she entered Lowell "shy but cocky" in her freshman year, but now teaches a class and has learned how to cooperate in her drill team, leaving the leading to the commander. If all you see are kids marching and obeying commands, she says, you aren't looking hard enough. The students take pride in perfecting their routines in much the same way as a cheerleader squad or marching band would value getting everyone in step.
Chung says she has no interest in joining the military; instead, she'll be heading to UC Davis next fall to study pre-med.
But one former student wasn't as clear about what he wanted to do after high school, and was relieved that his JROTC instructors could help him get out of the military. Miles Stepto enlisted in the Marines after his junior year at Mission High without telling his JROTC instructors, since he figured they'd just tell him to go to college first, as they told everyone else. But as senior year rolled around, he stepped into the office of his instructor, a retired infantry first sergeant we'll call Sarge (who didn't want his name published because "I have to walk to the train station at night") to see how he could get out. Sarge called Stepto's recruiter, chewed him out for talking to Stepto behind his back, and demanded he let the teen out. "When a first sergeant calls, you either do it or you're dead," Sarge explains.
It must have worked. Last July, Stepto received a letter stating he had no more "contractual affiliation or obligation to any component of the United States Marine Corps." He was a free man.
Don't be fooled by such tales, opponents warn. JROTC creates a "brand loyalty" to the military among kids who otherwise wouldn't have thought of the armed services as an option. Even if they don't enlist right after graduation, once they hit a tough job market or find college classes harder than expected, they'll think back on the good times and constant promotions in JROTC, says Pablo Paredes of the American Friends Service Committee, who does counterrecruiting in schools.
"They're there to romanticize the military experience," he says. "When you've been in JROTC for four years, they speak this language to you, and it's less intimidating — the rank stuff ... the installation names, the job names — that becomes more friendly and familiar."
