JROTC plan for PE credit already facing challenge
June 15, 2009
The San Francisco school board voted, by a bare 4-3 majority, to create an “independent study” physical education (PE) program for cadets in the district’s newly-restored Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC). The vote took place just last Tuesday, June 9, but the new PE program is already running into problems.
The PE program is an attempt to wiggle through state laws on “independent study” and set up a system where, with a wink-and-a-nod from school district officials, the Pentagon’s JROTC instructors will oversee a make-believe PE program for JROTC cadets. This would allow them to ignore the state’s PE curriculum and credentialing requirements, so they can use PE credit as bait for incoming freshman and sophomore students — 14 and 15 year olds — to get them into one of the military’s favorite and most successful recruitment programs.
There have been bipartisan efforts in recent years by state legislators to tighten up PE curriculum and credentialing standards, in response to the ongoing crisis in physical fitness, obesity and diabetes among our youth, particularly low-income youth and youth of color. These new standards prompted San Francisco to withdraw PE credit for JROTC in the 2008-09 school year. Pro-JROTC forces have introduced legislation in the state Assembly that would allow local school boards to ignore state standards and grant PE credit for JROTC and certain other classes, such as marching band, but none of these bills have gone anywhere.
Thus the need for the pro-JROTC gang of four to come up with this convoluted “independent study” strategem.
But the new PE program, barely out of the gate, is already having problems. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday, June 12 that school district officials are throwing cold water on the plan. According to this press report the legal eagles in the district are saying that JROTC students will “have to document 400 hours worth of PE content and course time OUTSIDE the JROTC course... Board members who voted for the measure Tuesday and JROTC instructors say they believed students would be able to count some of the time spent on PE activities during JROTC classes toward the independent study requirements. That was kind of the whole point.”
In contrast, Public Advocates, the well-respected public-interest law firm that threatened to sue the district last year if it granted PE credit to JROTC, had previously said that the plan to allow JROTC cadets to get credit for “independent study” during JROTC classes “is an improper and unauthorized use of that ed code section which is meant for alternative, individually crafted independent study options outside of school generally, not for creating within-school exemptions for a whole class of kids from a required course of study. Another way of thinking about this is that students in a JROTC course are not doing ‘independent’ study; they’re studying together as a group in a class at the same school. If this use of the ed code is ok, then it could also be used to satisfy Algebra I with an alternative, watered-down ‘algebra I’ course in name only taught by an instructor without a proper math credential.”
The school board vote on PE credit was the same as the May vote to restore JROTC in San Francisco: President Kim-Shree Maufas, Vice-President Jane Kim and new board member Sandra Lee Fewer opposed, but the gang of four — Jill Wynns, Rachel Norton, Hydra Mendoza and Norman Yee — in favor.
What is revealing about this fight over PE credit is the way that JROTC boosters have abandoned their rhetoric about giving students a “choice” to be part of the military program. Now it is all about PROMOTING the program, pumping up the program, luring youth onto a military track, particularly low income youth and youth of color, using PE credit as the bait.
As the Chronicle article said, this is “the controversy that won’t die.”