American Youthworks now enrolling: conservation and green building programs

I've been hearing radio spots on NPR this week that American Youthworks is enrolling students for its programs.  These are good opportunities for learning skills and doing creative, helpful work in areas of conservation and green building.  American Youthworks operates Youthbuild and Texas Conservation Corps, which are Americorps programs that include skills training, living wages, health care and education awards toward college.  These are sustainable options for youth!  Check them out at www.americanyouthworks.org

Apply for free training in the building trades

If you're interested in getting training in the building trades, check out the program at the United Brotherhood of Carpenters (this includes women!) at www.ubctexastraining.com  right here in Austin.   Austin is a leader in green building, and this training reflects that.

Teaching Environmental Justice -- a workshop in Austin by Rethinking Schools

Good news from the folks at Rethinking Schools:

Teaching Climate Change and Environmental Justice
Thursday, November 21University of Texas Austin College of Education

Dear Texas Rethinking Schools friends,
We are happy to announce that while in Austin for the National Council for the Social Studies annual conference, Rethinking Schools editor Bill Bigelow will offer a free full-day workshop on teaching about climate change and environmental justice on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2019 at the University of Texas Austin College of Education.

Sign up here.

Bigelow will introduce lessons from the Rethinking Schools book he co-edited, A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis . Each participant will receive a free copy of the book.

Event Details

University of Texas Austin College of Education
Thursday, Nov. 21, 2019

8:30am to 3:30pm

Ideal for in-service and pre-service teachers, other school staff, curriculum coordinators, teacher educators, school media specialists, and environmental justice activists.

Breakfast and lunch are provided.

Sponsored by the Texas Center for Education Policy, UT Austin College of Education, Environment Texas, and Rethinking Schools.

Space is limited, so sign up today

Meet the Teaching People’s History Team at NCSS 2019

And if you are going to the National Council for the Social Studies in Austin, Nov. 22-24, visit the Zinn Education Project booth in the exhibit hall, and attend workshops led by Rethinking Schools editors, Adam Sanchez, Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, and Bill Bigelow.
More details here.

Austin Climate Strike!

Great turnout for the Austin Climate Strike yesterday at the TX State Capitol -- organized by students! Millions rallied and marched worldwide in defense of the planet.  We can't have a healthy planet without stopping war and militarism. 

Reminder: AISD policy limiting access to students by military recruiters

The 2019 - 2020 school year is beginning, and we remind all AISD teachers, staff, students, parents and military recruiters that AISD has a policy that places limits on access to students by military recruiters.  Please note especially that recruiters are not allowed to ask students directly for their contact information (point 8, below).  If recruiters want to hand a student their card, fine, but they should not ask students to write down their phone numbers.  If school staff or students see recruiters getting phone numbers from students or violating any of the other guidelines in the policy, this should be reported to the school principal.

Here is the AISD policy that applies to all military recruiters in Austin's public schools:

GKC (Local) AISD Policy regarding military recruiters on AISD campuses:

The following guidelines shall apply to recruiters on District campuses:

1. All recruiters shall first report to the campus main office to obtain a visitor’s badge each time they visit school property.

2. The principal shall designate specific areas on each campus for recruiting purposes. Recruiting may not occur at school athletic events or other school-sponsored events, unless specifically authorized by the principal.

3. Recruiters shall not continue ongoing contact when a student makes it clear by speech or other conduct that contact with the recruiter is unwelcome. In no event may recruiters meet with a student under the age of 18 years off campus without written consent submitted to a campus administrator by the student’s parent or guardian.

4. Evidence of a parent’s or guardian’s intent to provide directory information upon request shall be respected. [See FL]

5. The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test shall be administered according to the same terms and conditions as other aptitude tests administered within the District. District schools shall select “Option 8” on the ASVAB test prior to the administration of the ASVAB at the school to ensure consistency with the opt-out provisions for release of contact information to the military.

6. Recruiting of any kind shall not be permitted at a time, place, and manner that disrupts classroom instruction. Recruiting in a classroom or other designated space shall be acceptable if it is at the invitation of authorized school personnel and part of a school-approved program.

7. Schools shall allow information regarding recruiting, including recruiting by the military and those advocating alternatives to the military, to be made available to students in an equivalent manner and location.

8. Recruiters shall not solicit student contact information directly from a student or require such information as a condition to participate in an activity or to receive an award or gift.

If a visitor fails to comply with the general rules or guidelines set out in this policy, the principal or other campus administrator may deny the visitor access to the campus in accordance with law. If a military recruiter fails to comply with the guidelines set out in this policy, the principal or other campus administrator may contact the military recruiter's supervisor to report the failure to comply and request that such individual not return to the campus.

   

SOY and Truth in Recruitment featured in "In These Times" article

Thanks to journalist, Elizabeth King, for this story published in the online version of "In These Times" magazine on June 27, 2019.  The piece features SOY and also Truth in Recruitment in Santa Barbara, CA.

Why We Still Need a Movement to Keep Youth From Joining the Military

A scrappy counter-recruitment movement is trying to starve the military of labor.

BY ELIZABETH KING

Eighteen is the youngest age at which someone can join the U.S. military without their parents’ permission, yet the military markets itself to—which is to say recruits—children at much younger ages. This is in part accomplished by military recruiters who visit high schools around the country, recruiting children during career fairs and often setting up recruitment tables in cafeteri­as and hallways. As a result, most students in the U.S. will meet a military recruiter for the first time at just 17 years old, and children are getting exposed to military propaganda younger and younger.

The recruitment of young people to the military is as old as the military itself, and has become more and more normalized along with the general militarization of schools. According to the Urban Institute, more than two-thirds of public high school students attend schools where there are “school resource officers,” a name for school-based police. This police presences comes on top of the role of military recruiters on campuses, or at college and career fairs. 

Counter-recruitment surged in popularity during George W. Bush’s Iraq War, when the U.S. military ratcheted up recruitment for the war. But these days you don’t hear much about this movement, despite the fact that the U.S. is still engaged in brutal wars, from Yemen to Afghanistan, and the Trump administration has been threatening war with Iran. Out of the spotlight, dedicated counter-recruiters around the country are steadfast in their organizing to cut off the human supply chain to the U.S. military. U.S. wars have caused innumerable deaths, created long-term hardships in occupied nations, and cost trillions of dollars. Counter-recruitment, then, is about starving the military of the labor it needs to accomplish these destructive missions. When working with students, parents and school leadership, counter-recruiters focus on a variety of issues, including the negative personal consequences that come with being a soldier and broader problems like racism and U.S. imperialism.

Kate Connell, the director of the California counter-recruitment organization Truth in Recruitment, a parent, and a Quaker, tells In These Times that one reason counter-recruitment efforts are so overlooked these days is that U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have fallen out of the news. “I think that's kind of what got people concerned and out in the streets” in the past, she says. Though this movement doesn’t get as much attention these days, organizers and activists say that counter-recruitment efforts remain critically important.

For the most part, activists who do counter-recruitment work in schools focus on matching or exceeding military recruiters in face-time with kids. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, military recruiters are required to have the same level of access to students as college and career professionals who recruit in schools.

Hart Viges, a U.S. Army veteran who has been volunteering in counter-recruitment for around a decade and works with Sustainable Options for Youth-Austin (SOY-Austin), says his role is to educate children using interactive tabling in schools. The group brings t-shirts and a “peace wheel” the students can spin to learn more facts about the military. Children also get to discuss how they’d like taxpayer dollars spent. For example, they might discuss whether they want to spend billions on war, or allocate that money elsewhere. Viges is blunt with them about what life will be like after time spent in the military.

“I ask them, ‘Do you like fireworks?’” Viges says. When they respond yes, he explains, “you won’t like them anymore” after coming back from a war. He tells them the realities of living with post-traumatic stress disorder brought about by combat, and how it does lasting damage to veterans. Being real with children about the military has proven effective for Viges. “There's so many wins in counter recruitment I feel,” he adds. “I talk to kids who are thinking about joining and I tell them the realities of it, and you can see their minds start to change… With politicians it's like a stalemate, but counter-recruitment is like a punch in the gut that will topple the military industrial complex.” Hart also talks to children about other issues connected to the military industrial complex that concerns them, such as war in general, racism, sexism and climate change.

Youth are active in this work, too. Jenny, a 16-year-old incoming junior at Santa Maria High School in California, interns with Truth in Recruitment. She tells In These Times that she got involved with the organization after a friend told her it would be a good way to stand up for herself and her peers who are frequently visited by military recruiters at school.

When she started high school, Jenny says she noticed that the military recruiters frequented her school, but other opportunities for students post-high school were not well represented. “I thought this was a problem, especially since the majority of us are students of color and I thought that we were being disproportionately targeted because we are people of color,” she says.

Angel further notes that many students at her school are undocumented, and she noticed that military recruiters were telling her peers distorted information about the benefits of military service based on their undocumented status. She says that after speaking to military recruiters, a number of her peers have said that they were promised they would get U.S. citizenship if they served in the military. While there is some pathway for non-citizens who serve in the military to become naturalized, this is not a guaranteed benefit. In fact, the U.S. government has a history of deporting foreign nationals who were employed by the military. “I always have to correct them because I don't want them to join and not know the full truth about it,” Angel says. “We wouldn't be seeing these things at schools rich, white students attend.”

The military does, in fact, tend to recruit in poor and working class communities, especially among Black and Latinx youth. The strategy of targeting poor, working-class, and Black and Latinx people for military conscription is known as the “poverty draft.” The tactics of this strategy can be seen in military recruitment efforts at schools like Santa Maria High School where Angel attends, and is evident in studies on the socioeconomic status of people who fought in recent US wars. According to a 2016 study out of Boston University and the University of Minnesota Law School, “Today, unlike in World War II, the Americans who die or are wounded in war are disproportionately coming from poorer parts of the country.”

Connell, the Truth in Recruitment director, says that the tactics used by military recruiters on children are “very much a grooming process.” She notes that branches of the military operate social media accounts, where they will follow and communicate with students who are potentially interested in joining up. In this way, recruiters have direct, unsupervised access to young teens, who may or not be discussing recruitment efforts with trusted adults in their lives. This type of behavior, Connell says, is “inappropriate.”

Still, the presence of the military in schools has become normalized. “I feel that the idea that the military is an untouchable subject as far as criticism or cutting the budget, [makes counter-recruitment] a really tricky conversation to have, so people avoid it.” The institutional power and not to mention funding and broad support that the military has makes counter-recruitment a challenge.

But the group has seen concrete results from their organizing and advocacy. Working with students, parents, and school and district leadership in Santa Barbara in 2014, Truth in Recruitment was able to convince the district to create better resources for parents to more easily opt their students out of having their information shared with military recruiters.

Though counter-recruitment is perhaps not as prominent as it was more than a decade ago, organizers in this field are unequivocal about the need to support students by offering alternatives to the military, such as college or the workforce. As the military continues to target children, especially in low-income and Black and Latinx communities, counter-recruiters will continue to work with children and their care-takers to offer safer, more dignified options for life after high school.

For a Climate of Peace

A new show of art at the Austin Central Public Library by Calder Kamin is a brilliant exhibition of pieces depicting animals at risk of extinction.  The pieces are constructed of pieces of trash -- plastics and other non-biodegradable materials that are part of the problem in our earth's fight for survival.  Kamin dedicates the show to the youth who are now on the forefront of the movement for immediate action on climate change.  Kids who came to the Kamin exhibit were invited to make posters to add to the display, and this is one.  Indeed, a major part of our efforts to stop harming the environment must be to stop war and militarization.  The US military is still the largest institutional polluter in the world.  What is supposed to be "defense" is really offense.  What is supposed to protect people is really hurting people.  We do need a climate of peace in order to preserve our planet. 

 

Career Fair SOY tabling at newly renamed Northeast High School

Yesterday, Hart, Tami and I really appreciated participating in an all-day career fair at Reagan HS -- soon to be called Northeast HS because of the Confederate associations with the Reagan name. About 100 students came by to do some or all of the t-shirt challenge.

In response to the reflection question about which of the Supervillains they would fight and how, about half chose Racism. I am happy for the school's name change away from the Confederate Postmaster because it is clear that racism is a very present concern for students. As one student wrote, "We can fight racism by overcoming white privilege."  About 17% of students chose to fight the Sexism Supervillain because, as one student wrote, "We should all be treated equally, and the way we will fight is by using our voices." The Supervillains of War, Greed and Ecocide each were named by about 11% of students. Wrote one, "Ecocide. I mean we can try together as a society by reducing how much pollution we produce like ride a bike/walk if its somewhere close." Another wrote, "I'd go for Ecocide because without the earth, we couldn't solve any of those. We could do regular old recycling, or could waste less."  Wrote another, "Ecocide, because at the moment I feel that the ecosystem is really in trouble."

Choosing to fight against War, one student wrote, "because of all the innocent people dying for no reason or getting captured."  Another student wrote that war could be prevented by coming up "with a really good compromise for both sides."  And as another student concluded, "I would choose to fight War, because I would like to see Peace and how it would feel."

Penny Poll results from about 90 students showed a priority for Education at 29% of the vote ("for my kids," said one student), 28% for the Environment, 24% for Health Care, 10% for NASA and 9% for the Military.

Speaking of the military, there were 3 tables of military branches at the career fair: Army, Marines and Army National Guard. Northeast also has an Air Force JROTC and a number of students were wearing their insignia and helping out with the career fair. I was dismayed to see that the recruiters had sign-up sheets set out at their tables for students to write down their contact information. I showed the 3 recruiters the AISD policy that prohibits recruiters from soliciting student contact information. They responded that they weren't "soliciting" --they were just putting the sign-up sheet out there. I believe they know the intent of the policy is to not get phone numbers from students, but they are trying to circumvent the policy.

We were glad to be part of the career fair to offer some balance to the recruiters and to give students an opportunity to talk about what is important to them.  As the EMT who was set up at the table next to us said, his mission and ours were the same: to try and prevent pain and suffering.  

Army recruitment table with sign-up sheet collecting student contact information -- in violation of AISD policy regarding recruitment in schools

Marines recruitment table with sign-up sheet collecting student contact information, in violation of AISD policy regarding recruitment in schools

Crockett Cougars fight the Super-villains

some of our literature, including a helpful flier about 8 of the local Americorps programs

Yesterday, Hart, Tami and I had a good lunch-hour visit to Crockett HS.  Students were eager to do the t-shirt challenge, and they had ideas for how to fight the Super-villains of Greed, Racism, War, Sexism and Ecocide.  Penny Poll results showed the biggest priority for Health Care, with 36.5% of the vote, followed by 26.5% for Education, 16.5% for the Environment, 12% for the Military and 8.5% for NASA.

Here are some of their responses to the Super-villains question.  Thanks, Cougars!

War because it needs to stop.  People need to agree with me -- violence is never the answer

Ecocide, I believe expansion is killing our environment

I will fight racism by showing that everyone is equal and spreading awareness

We saw this poster on a bulletin board and thought it was excellent

Earn money for college and help the earth and children at the same time!

At the Akins HS career fair this week, Hart and I met several enthusiastic Americorps members who are working with this after-school 4-H program with elementary school students.  This is a good opportunity for high school graduates to get great teaching experience along with a living stipend and an education award toward college.  And it's helping kids learn about the earth, gardening and animals!

Fighting the supervillains of Racism, Militarism, Poverty, Sexism and Ecocide

Yesterday, we had a two-fer!  We tabled over the lunch hour at Travis HS and then in the evening at a career fair at Akins HS.  We appreciated all the thoughtful responses to the reflection question about how to overcome the supervillains of racism, poverty, militarism, sexism and ecocide.  Most students chose racism as the supervillain they chose to fight, while several Travis students noted they didn't feel that racism was a particular problem they faced at school.  A few students asked what "militarism" meant.  Just before our Travis visit, Hart had shown me the "toy" in this photo:  soldier figures holding automatic weapons and described as "world peacekeepers" -- marketed, as noted, for ages 3 and up.  This is an Exhibit A for what militarism means.

Here are some of the responses from the two high schools:

At both Travis and Akins, the Penny Poll showed a priority for spending on Education, with 38% of the penny vote at Travis and 31% of the vote at Akins.  As one young man said at Akins, with enough funding for education, all our other needs can be met.
Penny Poll results at Travis:  38% for Education, 25% for Health Care, 17% for Humanitarian Aid, 14% for the Environment, 5% for the Military, 1% for NASA

Penny Poll results at Akins:  31% for Education, 21% for Health Care, 17% for the Military, 14% for the Environment, 10% for Humanitarian Aid, 7% for NASA.

We appreciated meeting some of the other tablers at the Akins career fair, including young adults from a cosmetology school, Americorps members working with an after-school 4-H program, and a representative for a study-abroad college program.

It was also good to see this book display in the Akins HS Library for African-American History Month.

Thanks, Travis Rebels and Akins Eagles!