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Communty divided on proposed high school with military ties
by Jonathan Cribbs
jonathan@dekalbchamp.com
A group of activists had about a week and a half starting the morning of April 4 to craft a cogent, convincing verbal attack against the DeKalb County School System’s proposed military school. They sat around a square of folding tables inside American Friends Service Committee’s downtown Atlanta building and debated talking points. “With the clock ticking, we also have to say this is not OK,” said Tim Franzen, director of the committee’s Peace Building program. “This is a program designed to cultivate combat engineers.”
Balewa Alimayu, 61, of Atlanta agreed. He was one among a group of 16 people–some war veterans, others objectors–who said they are aligned against the school that Saturday morning and represent a patchwork of local veterans and advocacy groups. “The problem is these kids are poor, and that’s why this attack is being staged on them,” said Alimayu, a Vietnam veteran.
The group represents the greatest challenge to the DeKalb Marine Corps Institute, which the school system plans to open to its first freshman class – about 150 students – in August. The school board plans to address the issue at two public hearings next week. The first will be held inside the Heritage School, 2225 Heritage Drive, Atlanta, on April 14 at 6:30 p.m. The second will be held inside Elizabeth Andrews High School, 2415 North Druid Hills Road, Atlanta, on April 16 at 6:30 p.m.
Both hearings are dedicated to updating the public on the school system’s consolidation and redistricting plan, including school closures. But local activists said they plan to protest the military institute, which may open inside a revamped Heritage School, system officials said. The board decided to approve the school’s concept in February, and the school system awaits final approval from the U.S. Marine Corps.
Franzen organized the group into smaller teams that would create a series of planned statements, criticizing the school. During a meeting in his upstairs office, he focused on Christopher Raissi, a 25-year-old Marietta resident, who was discharged from the Marines last year. He said he was a Marine for several years but spent his final year as a recruiter.
“They’re going to be training these kids to accept shooting and killing,” he said. “It’s just going to happen.”
Franzen said he thought Raissi would be a particularly valuable speaker since the group believes the institute will simply recruit and pipeline poor Black students into the military. Raissi said he was concerned the district and school board approved the school quickly and without significant public input. “Whenever they do something without transparency, you have to assume they have nefarious purposes,” he said.
But William McHenry, national director for the Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, said the school would be the most well-designed of the Marines’ military schools across the nation. The school will expand to include grades nine through 12 over the next four years for about 650 students across DeKalb County. The school is designed to keep classes small and intact over the four years, McHenry said.
The school will avoid hiring teachers with master’s degrees in education and favor a candidate with a master’s in the subject they teach, he said. That way, a teacher can follow the same students as ascend from grade to grade, creating a more committed, communal atmosphere. “They form some cohesiveness,” he said. “You can put expectations on that group, and that group itself will perpetuate those expectations.”
The school may also use a year-round schedule that, ideally, would alternate between two months of schooling and two weeks of vacation, McHenry said. Those details and a curriculum to suit the calendar are still being debated, however, he said.
McHenry also said Congress charged the military, legally, not with just recruiting students into the military but also teaching well-roundedness and personal discipline. Students attending the school will have no military commitment, and the school will require students to take classes with 15 college-level credits during their senior year, giving them a head start on a college degree, he said.
“It’s trying to give kids options,” McHenry said. “Education gives a kid keys. The more education you get, the more keys you have on your key ring. … [Students] don’t know what doors they’re going to encounter in their life, but they’re going to encounter these closed doors. … It’s creating more options than rather decreasing options, and I think that’s a pretty hard position to disagree with. Education empowers people.”
Several school board officials said they see no need to double-back on the school in light of protests. District 1 representative Jim Redovian said he thinks the board and school system could have communicated better with the public.
“The problem is we never really communicated that it really had nothing to do with the military from the perspective of what we were trying to accomplish,” he said. Other board members said the school will likely provide much-needed behavioral discipline and structure to students that they do not receive in a typical school. District 5 representative Jay Cunningham said the majority of feedback he has received from the public has been positive.
“We’re doing our due diligence to answer the questions they have,” he said. Back at American Friends Service Committee, Franzen said the group needed to understand that a military institute that will help discipline poor, disadvantaged students and help them go to college will look appealing on the surface. “This is sounding really good to struggling families,” he said. “We need to understand and respect the families.”
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