San Francisco Drops JROTC

The one thing San Francisco could really use is some youth with decent sets of principles and goals, but that effort was short circuited with the decision to cut funding for the Junior ROTC program:

SAN FRANCISCO — High schools across the city soon will no longer have Junior Reserve Officers'Training Corps programs after officials decided to eliminate them because of the Pentagon's"don't ask, don't tell"policy regarding gay service members.
The Board of Education voted 4-2 late Tuesday to phase out the JROTC from schools over the next two years, despite protest from hundreds of students who rallied outside the meeting.

The resolution passed says the military's ban on openly gay soldiers violates the school district's equal rights policy for gays.

The school district and the military currently share the $1.6 million annual cost of the program. About 1,600 San Francisco students participate in JROTC at seven high schools across the district.

Cadets and instructors who spoke at the meeting and rallied outside argued that the program teaches leadership, organizational skills, personal responsibility and other important values.

"This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe,"said Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor."You're going to take that away from them?"

Scrappleface has the breaking news that a new program will be instituted instead:

November 15, 2006
San Francisco Dumps JROTC, Adopts GayROTC
by Scott Ott

(2006-11-15) — The San Francisco School Board last night cut off funding for a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program that served 1,600 students in seven high schools, because board members said it promoted the U.S. military, which discriminates against homosexuals.

In place of JROTC, the district will institute a new character development program called GayROTC, which supporters said has many of the positive elements of the old program, “without the dangerous, radical agenda that leads youth toward a self-destructive lifestyle,” according to board members Dan Kelly and Mark Sanchez.

That sounds about right.

Of course, San Francisco has a long and bleak history of dissing the military. I wrote awhile back about their decision not to accept the battleship Iowa as a floating museum because ship's big guns scared the locals. I enjoyed visiting up there earlier this year, but the locals are a bunch of wimps and sissies, and if the San Andreas fault is looking for a good place to open up a whole and swallow the surroundings, I can't think of a better spot than right under that city.