Chicago Students Mobilize Against the Draft

[reprehensor]

Published June 6, 2004

NORTH SIDE -- Students at Senn High School at 5900 N. Glenwood Ave. are taking action after hearing political leaders are talking about reinstating the draft.

A petition is circulating at the school and students are sending e-mails and writing letters to their congressmen in protest of two bills: U.S. Senate Bill 89 and House Bill 163. The bill would require all young persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 26, including women, to perform a period of military service or civilian service.

Brandi Mora, a volunteer with Amnesty International, said she was floored by the students' reaction.

"They wanted to know as much as they could because they were so upset by it," she said. "They wanted to know who they needed to write to and what they could do to stop it. I just didn't think that they would be that passionate about wanting to stop something that is really political."

(The whole article is only 4 paragraphs.)

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1. Here's a longer article on the situation

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Sharkey1015.htm

By a teacher at the school.

We first began to realize something was wrong when teams of teams of men with suits and clipboards began walking through the halls of our high school during the first week of classes. We had heard that the U.S. Navy was planning to open a “Naval Academy” on Chicago’s North Side, but it never occurred to us that they would try to put it in our building. After all, we were already using our building!

Nonetheless, it became clear that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) was in fact targeting our school after we crashed a meeting at the 48th ward alderman’s office--and discovered that CPS was planning a “community forum” at Senn to sell the idea.

In some ways, Senn High School is a pretty typical “inner-city” school. Ninety-two percent of our students are poor. We don’t have lots of resources, our building needs paint, and our students are not the ones who test into the fancy magnet programs.

But in other ways, our school is a remarkable community resource, with plenty of morale. Our students come from 70 nationalities, speak 57 different languages and still maintain a sense of unity and mutual respect. Senn students have performed 70,000 hours of community service over the past five years and have been recognized with a national service award. Senn has also developed some of the city’s most successful academic programs for at-risk kids.