Hartford Courant: Groups offer teens counterpoint to military recruiters.

http://www.courant.com/news/education/hc-antirecruit0313.artmar13,0,815518.story?coll=hc-big-headlines-breaking

This article leads today's Sunday edition of the Hartford Courant. Sunday is of course the day every paper enjoys it's widest circulation; it is significant that the Courant runs stories like this on Sunday. Kudos to the Hartford Courant for daring to report outside the message.

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Resistance Campaign
by Penelope Overton

The military recruiters began calling Jesus Ortiz as soon as he turned 17. The senior at Bulkeley High School in Hartford told them repeatedly he wasn't interested, but that didn't stop them.

He was sick of the monthly calls - and afraid that he might one day be seduced by their promises of college money, job training and world travel - but he didn't know how to stop them.

"I tell the recruiters, `No way I'm going to get myself killed for you,' but those guys don't care," Ortiz said. "They wear you down. `Stop by and have a little talk, have some pizza,' they say. They say `No pressure,' but they work you over hard."

Now, with the help of a counter-recruiting group called Latinos Contra la Guerra (Latinos Against the War), Ortiz is exploiting a little-known clause in a federal education law that will allow him to throw the military recruiters off his trail.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, any school that receives grant money from the federal government must provide the military with student data - unless the students specifically request a Section 9528 exemption.

The obscure loophole is a weapon in the arsenal of Connecticut's budding counter-recruitment movement, a loose-knit alliance of peace groups struggling to educate students about alternatives to military service.

The counter-recruiters range from fiery young Latinas to disenchanted gay veterans to white-haired grandmothers to preachers.

<snip>

The counter-recruiters in Connecticut are part of a national counter-recruiting network that stretches from Maine to California and encourages members to share strategies and statistics.

The movement is picking up steam as military recruiters across the nation find they are falling short of their recruitment goals for the first time in years.

The Connecticut National Guard needs to fill more than 1,000 positions in its 4,200-member ranks, Lt. Col. John Whitford said. The guard will soon double its recruiting staff and launch a magazine and cable show for high schools.

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more at link above

p.s. The poll at the article is worth hitting:

Should peace groups working as counter-recruiters have equal access to students in high schools as military recruiters?

Yahoo! News - 'Counter-recruiters' shadowing the military
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/usatoday/20050308/ts_usatoday/counterrecruitersshadowingthemilitary

truthout - Military Recruiters Face Resistance from Young Anti-War ...
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022505N.shtml

rand holman's THE DAILY POLEMIC: Counter-Recruiters, protected .
http://thedailypolemic.blogs.com/rand/2005/03/counterrecruite.html


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