WE WELCOME YOUR COMMENTS BELOW
Military school comes under fire
by Jonathan Cribbs
Jonathan@dekalbchamp.com
DeKalb County School System Superintendent Crawford Lewis Monday criticized activists calling a military-style high school the district hopes to open in August nothing more than a recruiting station for the U.S. Marine Corps.
“There’s been a lot of e-mails and criticisms of the [proposed DeKalb Marine Corps Institute],” Lewis said Monday evening. “None of these people have extended the courtesy of coming to talk to me. They make some wild assumptions about what it is and what it is not.
“This is not a war factory where we are trying to get more warm bodies to send to war,” he said.
Lewis also vigorously defended the military’s interest in the district and said the institute’s critics are wrongly disparaging the military despite its defense of American democracy.
“Quite frankly, I feel a lot of hypocritical comments coming from these folks,” he said.
Lewis spoke with The Champion after a group called the Student Alternative Career Project protested the school Saturday with a letter to school officials and local media. The group, which is aligned with several local advocacy groups, is not beyond suing the district to keep the school – the first of its kind proposed in Georgia – from opening, said Michael Burke, the project’s spokesman who also said he served in the Army from 1960-71.
“Many of us are shocked by this overtly counter-productive step backward, especially now since [President Barack Obama] is reaching out to other nations to find us some friends in the world,” Burke wrote to school officials. “Why wouldn’t we rather invest our rapidly diminishing local and national resources in establishing peace schools, sustainable energy schools, alternative fuel schools or any other gainful schooling beside the ‘art of warfare.’”
In an interview Tuesday, Burke said Lewis did invite him and a group of supporters to meet with him recently to talk about the school, but when Burke sent a response offering a date and time it went unanswered. He said he believes the school is designed to capitalize on poor, Black students with limited career and schooling options and will only help Marines recruit students.
“We are not going to stand for it. We’ll do whatever we have to do legally and take this battle to the people. It belongs in their arena,” Burke said. “They snuck this around the back door. Never did they consult with the public.”
The school board approved the school in September.
The district is still negotiating the school’s details with the Marines, Lewis said, and details were scant. The school would open to a freshman class of about 150 cadets in August and expand to an enrollment no larger than 650 students in four years, Lewis said. Students will apply for admission to the school, and they wouldn’t be required to serve in the military upon graduation. Several locations are being considered, but Lewis named one: inside the district’s Heritage Center off Briarcliff Road north of Decatur.
A commandant has been hired to run the school, Lewis said–an unidentified retired officer with a 32-year military career. The school would be managed by two individuals, the commandant focusing on discipline and the school’s military regimen and a non-military principal focusing entirely on academics, Lewis said. The district and the Marines would share the school’s operating costs.
“Oftentimes [principals] find themselves engulfed in everything else from parent conferences to discipline to athletics to everything you can think of,” said Lewis. “We want to see what efforts will result in greater learning for our young people when the principal focuses on hiring the teachers and the reading, writing and arithmetic.”
Similar schools have opened across the nation in recent years. Activists protested the opening of a Marines school in Chicago in 2007 for the same reasons Burke is fighting the school in DeKalb. Chicago Public Schools runs military-sponsored high schools for each branch of the military, and most of the students are low-income.
Lewis said he wants poorly disciplined students to come to the institute to benefit from the rigid structure of a military school – not to help the Marines enlist them upon graduation. It could also help correct mistakes made through poor parenting across the district.
“It will teach kids discipline,” he said. “It will teach about civics and ethics – things we don’t teach in our normal classes.”
|
