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By Ashley Wu
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May. 26, 2009 |
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On May 12, the school board announced that it had passed two resolutions that will maintain the Junior Reserves Officers’ Training Corps program.
Students from the seven high schools in San Francisco that offer JROTC have fought alongside the JROTC instructors and Fiona Ma throughout the whole campaign and now have been successful in the first step — keeping JROTC. “It’s good that we have Fiona Ma on our side,” junior JROTC member Jane Ou said. “But Ma needs people to back her up too and that’s us.”
Students waited at 555 Franklin until 10:30 p.m. to see the process
through. “I was really tired, but the cause was worth it, and I feel
really relieved to hear that RO is staying for another two years,”
sophomore JROTC member Regina Ngo said.
The May 12 resolution states that the seven district high schools
that currently have JROTC programs will offer JROTC to all interested
students beginning in the ‘09-‘10 school year. But if in any year there
are less than 50 students enrolled in JROTC, the school may choose
whether they will drop JROTC as a course offering the following year.
The three-year battle to keep JROTC in San Francisco high schools
is finally over after the hard work put forth by the instructors and
students. With the knowledge that the program is reinstated, the JROTC
people will be able to start rebuilding their numbers since a huge
amount of students have dropped JROTC as their elective choice, due to
the threat to the program’s existence and to the school board’s
decision to cut Physical Education credit for RO in 2008.
Students left 555 Franklin after hearing what they had come to
hear. The school board members, however, stayed to decide on the fate
of JROTC instructors. “After a long campaign, I felt relieved, but bad
news came after the good news,” junior JROTC member Rachanna Kann said.
The pink slips issued to the instructors on March 15 have not been
rescinded at press time.
Senior JROTC member Phelan Guan also felt surprise after relief.
“It felt good for the first ten hours, but after that when we found out
that the instructors and the P.E. credit wasn’t solved, it was like
‘well, we got one thing done,’” he said.
Many are worried about Lowell’s JROTC instructor Lieutenant Colonel
Douglas Bullard, but Dennis Kelly, the president of the teachers’
union, believes that the instructors won’t be laid-off. “We are
confident that the district will understand the law and rescind their
wrongful termination of the instructors before they would become
unemployed on July 1,” he said.
According to school board member Norman Yee, the pink slips aren’t
the end of the road. “It’s sort of a process where if you haven’t
decided whether [the instructors] should come back or not, you have to
give them a pink slip,” he said. “After the school board assesses how
many teachers they really need, the instructors will be hired back.”
On April 1 the Assembly Education Committee passed Assemblywoman
Fiona Ma’s AB223 “urgency bill” in which she overrode a previous SFUSD
decision to phase out JROTC by June 2009 and demanded that JROTC be
offered in all district high schools. In April, the students of JROTC
depended on Ma’s bill to help reinstate JROTC, although they expressed
that their hopes were low for the continuation of the program. “Time is
the enemy, and a decision is not likely to be made by the end of the
school year,” senior JROTC member Jarrett Hornbostel had said back in
April. Now, however, JROTC members do not have to worry about next year
since the recent decisions made by the school board has allowed JROTC
to continue. It is undecided if Ma’s bill will move forward, but it
will probably no longer be needed to pass, according to Bullard.
The bill proposed in February by Assemblywoman Mary Salas, which
provides school districts an alternative to meeting the graduation
requirements, will probably still continue on and will be voted on
soon, according to Bullard.
On May 16, the Lowell battalion won the overall 91st Spring
Competition with the Lowell Exhibition Team placing first, Drill
Platoon placing second and the Silent Drill Team placing third. “I was
ecstatic that RO wasn’t taken away and that we will have another shot
at getting back all of the trophies,” sophomore JROTC member Mitchell
Fong said.
At the competition, student delegate Maxwell Wallace was awarded
the JROTC citizenship award for his representation of the students and
his support for JROTC. “I came to the position of student delegate
objectively, not knowing whether or not I supported JROTC, but I ended
up supporting it,” Wallace said.
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