Our table today at Lanier High School

We've begun our spring semester literature tabling in the high schools. We've had good student interest at the tables. We staffed a table during lunch at Austin HS recently and today did one at Lanier HS and another at Akins HS. Here is a report on our experience at Lanier:

We double-booked today by mistake, but it's a good sign when there are enough of us to be at two schools on the same day. Thanks go out to Veterans for Peace, Dick Underhill and George Taylor (who happens to be visiting Austin this month) for joining me at Lanier HS. Hart and Spencer planned to table at Akins HS and we should hear back about that soon.

We had a good day at Lanier. They have two lunches on Mondays separated by about an hour between (nice chance to visit with co-tablers). Student interest was quite good. Almost every time someone stopped by the table, that drew others. The peace wheel was at Akins, so we did a penny poll. We were struck again by how much students were concerned about health care. 51 students did the poll, and here is the breakdown of the penny poll results:

Health Care -- 40% of pennies
Education -- 24%
Environment -- 16%
Military -- 10%
International Humanitarian Aid -- 10%

Quite a few took one look at the categories and chucked all their pennies into the health care jar. One student explained, "If you don't have health, you can't do anything else." One student put all her pennies into the military jar because she said she has family in the military. Most kids thought pretty carefully about how to distribute the pennies and were surprised when they saw the fliers showing how taxes are really spent. We could almost see the light bulbs going on about why there never seems to be money enough left over from war-making to give people proper health care. Something is messed up when young people have to even worry about health care.

We had a new batch of "I think for myself" buttons that were well-liked. We gave away almost all 50 that I had brought.

A group of about 3 young women students came by to tell us that they are part of a student group at Lanier that is planning a Day Without Violence event on April 4. They aren't sure yet what they will do, but they wanted to invite us and took a couple of fliers with our contact info.

We also invited kids to fill in the posters that say "I'd rather buy [blank] than war." Several wrote in "shoes." One wrote "shoes and dog." Another wrote "a million kittens and a car." Then she added "Green." I asked what she meant and she said "like green plants."

A number of women students wore peace signs on necklaces or clothing. It's great to see it back in vogue!