As a former high school teacher, I sometimes hear that past students have joined the military. There’s a decent sized JROTC presence in the D.C. public schools, and it wasn’t unheard of to see a military recruiter around the campus. Students in the JROTC talked up its scholarship opportunities, and several students, usually male, but not always, argued in classroom debates that the military was a good option for kids who couldn’t afford or didn’t want to go to college, or who sought a path to citizenship for themselves or their families. And each year, many students do enlist.
Yet last week, Marc Fisher’s column focused on the District’s disproportionate lack of nominations to tuition-free service academies, such as West Point. Members of Congress may nominate candidates to these schools, and securing a nomination is a competitive business in other regions, but Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s office rarely uses its allotted 40 nomination slots. According to Cartwright Moore, who manages the nomination process for Norton, the decline is due to the unpopularity of the military and the Iraq war. “We’ve had some years recently where no one requested a nomination to an academy,” he said. “This is at least a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of education, for free.” Only one of the eight nominations Norton has made in the past two years has been for a DCPS student – the rest have come from local private schools.
Like Fisher, I’m appalled that the opportunity for an excellent higher education, free of charge, isn’t being taken advantage of by more of the low-income, high-aspiring students of D.C. However, I’m less convinced that the cause is disillusionment with the military as much as it is lack of knowledge. At a graduation ceremony a couple of weeks ago, a particularly bright student who had once talked of studying theater or law in college told me he shipped out soon for basic training. When I called him a few days ago to ask if he had ever considering applying for a nomination to a military service academy, he said he hadn’t even known that was an option.
Photo by Grundlepuck
