Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: students

  • D.C. Students Skip Classes to Protest War: Activists from Wilson, Deal Demonstrate Against Military Strike on Iraq

    Eighteen-year-old Dante Furioso stood near the flagpole outside Woodrow Wilson Senior High School yesterday morning, and a few minutes before 9 turned his back on the principal and led a procession of teenagers away from campus to a nearby Metro station.

    This adventure in class-cutting was not for kicks. It was for a cause.

    Furioso was one of a few dozen Wilson students who boycotted classes as a symbolic gesture against a potential war with Iraq. Most participants were from Wilson in Northwest Washington and neighboring Alice Deal Junior High School. About 100 Wilson and Deal students sat out some or all of their classes at an antiwar rally outside the Tenleytown-AU Metro station, said Furioso, one of the Wilson students who coordinated the rally. D.C. school officials estimated that 50 students joined the protest.

    “This is a small sacrifice to make,” said Furioso, a senior.

    What Furioso and other students had sacrificed was unclear. Wilson Principal Stephen Tarason said students who took part in the protest face undetermined disciplinary action for cutting class, with possibilities ranging from detention to suspension. Deal officials would say only that 15 to 20 Deal students attended the protest, some with their parents.

    “I think the students have the right to protest,” Tarason said. “It’s always good for students to exercise their rights.”

    Wilson teacher Michele Bollinger collected 25 faculty signatures on a petition opposing disciplinary action for the students.

    The protest was timed to draw attention to this weekend’s antiwar demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere. International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), organizer of the upcoming events, said tens of thousands are expected for a march and rally Saturday, including scores of college and high school students who plan a second demonstration Sunday.

    Many at yesterday’s rally said a U.S. military strike against Iraq would be unjustified and called for the billions of dollars that would be needed to fight a war to be put toward funding education. Several criticized federal laws that require high schools to provide military recruiters access to students.

    “I think it’s really important that we’re doing something about [a potential war] rather than sitting in class talking about it,” said Deal eighth-grader Enise Conry, 13.

    Students took the event seriously, holding meetings with Tarason, attending a training session on nonviolent protest and working with police on a march route. “I wholeheartedly do not agree with this war,” said Wilson senior Liz Gossens, 17. “Every part of me is against this. I would do almost anything to show how strongly I feel.”

    Furioso said he was amazed at the turnout. When he and other Wilson students began planning the protest after attending an October antiwar demonstration, he said, they expected that it would become a “10- to 15-student operation.”

    But yesterday, as students chanted and waved banners outside the Metro station at Wisconsin Avenue and Albemarle Street NW, the event turned into something larger, attracting more students than expected, along with teachers, parents and other adult peace activists.

    The students scribbled antiwar messages in chalk on the sidewalk, beat bongo drums in shivering morning temperatures and handed out leaflets promoting Saturday’s rally. The yellow-and-blue chalk messages read: “Books are good, guns are bad.” Handwritten signs read: “Bombing Iraq is so 10 years ago.”

    During the rally and march, which ran from about 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., drivers of garbage trucks and passing cars honked their horns in support, to the cheers of students. One Wilson English teacher took students from her first-period class on a field trip to the rally, with their blessing. “We finished our Chaucer work, too, so the teacher’s happy,” said the teacher, Heleny Cook. District and Metro police kept a close watch on the rally, as did some parents and grandparents.

    “I support it, but I want to be here,” said Mary Pat Rowan, mother of a Deal ninth-grade protester.

    Just as supportive yet watchful was Michal Hunter, Furioso’s mother. “What better reason to miss a day of school,” said Hunter. “It’s a real life experience.”
    © 2003 The Washington Post Company

  • Recruiting Law Under Question

    Kelly Mendoza, a mom with two kids in high school, has no problem with military recruiters who come onto campus at lunchtime to talk with kids who might want to join the armed forces.

    But a new federal law requiring schools to give military recruiters the names, addresses and phone numbers of students has her worried.

    Her main misgiving: the law makes it easier for recruiters to go to students, rather than have students come to them.

    “Kids are too young in high school to be solicited over the phone,” said Mendoza, an Oxnard resident. “The military is a tough choice now; we could go to war any day. We have to protect our country, but it’s hard to think about your child going to war.”

    The new requirement, part of the No Child Left Behind Act passed in January, allows parents and students to request that schools not release personal information. But even with that provision, the law has some school officials uneasy about privacy issues.

    “As an administrator, I’m uncomfortable with giving out students’ phone numbers,” said Cliff Moore, principal of Oak Park High School. “When something’s mailed, kids have the opportunity to just throw it in the trash. But with a phone call, (recruiters) have a little more leverage.”

    Still, school officials throughout Ventura County say they intend to comply with the requirement, telling parents about it by letter in the next few weeks or in handbooks sent home at the start of the school year.

    Officials who don’t comply stand to lose federal money, which in some Ventura County school districts, such as Oxnard Union High, amounts to $2 million a year. The law also applies to private schools that receive federal funds.

    In addition to privacy concerns, the new law raises questions of just what information schools release and to whom.

    Up to now, some school districts, including Las Virgenes Unified and Santa Paula Union High, released basic information on students to military and college recruiters only if parents gave them written permission.

    Many others, though, including Fillmore, Oak Park and Oxnard Union, already give recruiters some students’ names and addresses, unless parents sign forms saying they don’t want that information released.

    The key, officials said, is that recruiters, whether they’re universities, employers or the armed forces, get the same access.

    “If you let the UCLA recruiter in, you have to let the military recruiter in, too,” said Donald Zimring, deputy superintendent for Las Virgenes.

    Military recruiters argue the new law means students will become aware of options they might not otherwise have considered.

    “This will open a lot of kids’ eyes,” said Gunnery Sgt. Milton Andrews, a Marine recruiter in Simi Valley. “A lot of kids come in and they don’t join. But at least they’ve looked at the option.”

    And while students may find calls from recruiters annoying, most are perfectly capable of figuring out whether the military is right for them, said Matt Lee, a junior at Newbury Park High School.

    “I’m not too concerned about this being used to brainwash students who wouldn’t otherwise want to join,” Lee said. “It’s a good way to spread information. If students really don’t want to join the military, then that’s their right.”

    Still, local educators and parents aren’t the only ones with privacy concerns.

    Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to school superintendents across the state, advising them to make it as easy as possible for parents to keep student information from being released.

    The letter reads in part: “(The law) subjects students and their families to unwanted release of personal information to outside entities as a condition of exercising the right — and obligation — to attend school. These concerns are magnified when the recipient of the information is the military.”

    Citing similar concerns about privacy, the Conejo Valley Unified School District is taking the opt-out option allowed under the law and flipping it.

    That means that Conejo Valley parents must sign a form specifically requesting the district to provide information about their children to military recruiters. If parents don’t return the form, the district assumes they don’t want their child’s phone number, and so forth, released.

    Conejo officials will still not provide student information to college and business recruiters, again citing privacy concerns.

    The district sent 3,000 letters to parents of juniors and seniors last month , informing them of the new requirement and asking them to return a short form if they want information released to the military. So far, it has received about 50 responses.

    “We are not taking any kind of pro or con stand on military recruiting,” said Assistant Superintendent Richard Simpson. “We want students to have access to that information, but we want that access to be because they’re interested in it.”

  • No Child Unrecruited: Should the military be given the names of every high school student in America?

    Sharon Shea-Keneally, principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, was shocked when she received a letter in May from military recruiters demanding a list of all her students, including names, addresses, and phone numbers.

    The school invites recruiters to participate in career days and job fairs, but like most school districts, it keeps student information strictly confidential. “We don’t give out a list of names of our kids to anybody,” says Shea-Keneally, “not to colleges, churches, employers — nobody.”

    But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law’s 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student — or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

    “I was very surprised the requirement was attached to an education law,” says Shea-Keneally. “I did not see the link.”

    The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation’s high schools are “problem schools” for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to schools on 19,228 occasions. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools “demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive.”

    To many educators, however, requiring the release of personal information intrudes on the rights of students. “We feel it is a clear departure from the letter and the spirit of the current student privacy laws,” says Bruce Hunter, chief lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. Until now, schools could share student information only with other educational institutions. “Now other people will want our lists,” says Hunter. “It’s a slippery slope. I don’t want student directories sent to Verizon either, just because they claim that all kids need a cell phone to be safe.”

    The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone — leaving students without any say in the matter.

    “I think the privacy implications of this law are profound,” says Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. “For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it’s something we should be concerned about.”

    Educators point out that the armed services have exceeded their recruitment goals for the past two years in a row, even without access to every school. The new law, they say, undercuts the authority of some local school districts, including San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, that have barred recruiters from schools on the grounds that the military discriminates against gays and lesbians. Officials in both cities now say they will grant recruiters access to their schools and to student information — but they also plan to inform students of their right to withhold their records.

    Some students are already choosing that option. According to Principal Shea-Keneally, 200 students at her school — one-sixth of the student body — have asked that their records be withheld.

    Recruiters are up-front about their plans to use school lists to aggressively pursue students through mailings, phone calls, and personal visits — even if parents object.

    “The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman,” says Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York. “Or maybe if the kid died, we’ll take them off our list.”

  • Military Recruiting Law Puts Burden on Parents

    Originally Published in the Washington Post

    Christopher Schmitt is careful to protect his son from companies that want to give the teenager credit cards or sell him sneakers. So at this year’s parents night at his son’s Fairfax County high school, Schmitt was dismayed to see a new form in the usual stack of permission slips and reminders.

    This one invited him to sign if he wanted his son’s name, address and telephone number withheld from the Pentagon. Otherwise, the information would be included in a directory of the school’s juniors and seniors that will be given upon request to military recruiters.

    Schmitt signed the form — quickly.

    “Most people probably missed [the form], and it’ll probably be too late,” Schmitt said. “There is a commodity with your consumer history. With the military, the commodity happens to be your children’s information. . . . Once there’s a point of entry, you don’t know where the information is going to go.”

    High schools across the nation must provide the directory — what one school official called “a gold mine of a list” — under a sleeper provision in the new No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted this year. Military officials pushed for it to counter a steady decline in the number of people who inquire about enlisting.

    Many schools already allow military recruiters on campus, sponsor ROTC programs or provide student information to the Pentagon if parents give permission. But many school officials say the mandatory provision — which puts the burden on parents to opt out rather than in — has them in an uncomfortable position.

    Part of their role as educators, they say, is to minimize intrusions so students can learn. Now, they risk losing federal funds if they don’t hand over students’ names to recruiters who, in the words of Chantilly High School Principal Tammy Turner, “want to capitalize on our captive audience.”

    Michael Carr, spokesman for the 38,000-member National Association of Secondary School Principals, said: “Student privacy is a big, big issue with schools. There are a lot of people trying to get identities of students — to get to that market.”

    There has been no uprising against the provision. Many parents and teachers see the armed forces as a possible career path and say that recruiters should have a chance to make their pitch.

    “There are great opportunities for these kids in the military,” said Donna Geren, a retired Navy commander whose son, Kyle, is a senior at West Potomac High School in Fairfax. “A lot of times, kids don’t find out about the scholarships they offer if schools are not allowed to share this information. I don’t see any downside to this.”

    Fairfax School Superintendent Daniel A. Domenech said that few parents have returned opt-out forms, but he thinks it may reflect a lack of attention rather than lack of opposition. “It makes me believe parents basically glossed over it,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll start getting calls from parents when they hear from the recruiters.”

    Although the number of military enlistees has remained fairly constant, the pool of prospective recruits continues to shrink, according to William Carr, director of military personnel policy for the Defense Department.

    More students are going to college, and in the 1990s, the tech boom created plenty of jobs, so the military was no longer the employer of last resort. Even students who express an interest say their parents don’t approve, especially as talk of war with Iraq escalates.

    In the past decade, the number of high school graduates who said they intended to join the military dropped from 32 percent to 25 percent, Carr said. At the same time, one-third of the nation’s 22,000 high schools refused recruiters’ requests for students’ names or access to campus, and the cost of recruiting one person rose from $6,000 to $12,000.

    After the military took its complaints to Congress, Rep. David Vitter (R-La.) sponsored an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act, a sweeping federal measure passed last year that makes schools accountable for student achievement. Vitter said that military recruiters, who offer scholarships and jobs, deserved to be on par with college recruiters.

    The student directories will be used to contact students by phone and mail, William Carr said. The recruitment effort should not be compared to telemarketing in any way, he said, and it would be illegal to use the data for any purpose other than recruiting.

    “You cannot equate military readiness to a free baseball cap,” Carr said. “There’s a considerable difference.”

    The provision isn’t a perfect solution for recruiters, said Charles Moskos, a professor and military recruiting expert at Northwestern University, but it is more realistic than trying to persuade Jenna Bush — or, better yet, rap star Eminem — to join the Marines.

    “That would change people’s minds,” said Moskos, who was in the Army in 1958 when photographs of a newly drafted Elvis Presley in uniform gave the military a Cold War boost. When he asks recruiters whether they would rather have their advertising budget tripled or see Chelsea Clinton enlist, he said, “they unanimously choose the Chelsea option.”

    The directory, Moskos said, is partly aimed at improving the quality of enlistees, seeking to attract students who stay in school and have other career options. But he isn’t sure it will work. “I don’t think the prime market is high school anymore,” Moskos said. “My research says the most effective recruiter is a friend or family member who made it a career.”

    Rick Jahnkow, program director for the California-based Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft, said the measure misplaces the responsibility. Recruiters “had a lot of pressure to meet their quotas, so they decided to pass the buck to schools,” he said. “Now it’s a huge hammer over the heads of schools, parents and students who will have their privacy invaded.”

    Part of the burden is turning out to be administrative. Shannon Tully, director of student services at South Lakes High School in Fairfax, said a recruiter came to ask for a computer disk with the names on it before she had time to prepare it. “We told him we didn’t have it, and a week later we get an e-mail saying we were a non-cooperating school.

    “They didn’t even let us know” he was coming, Tully said. “What are we supposed to be — a fast-food restaurant?”

    William Carr, of the Defense Department, said he was unaware of that incident and could not comment on it.

    John Porter, principal of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, said he doesn’t see any problems with the law. In the past, the school gave the Pentagon the names of students whose parents opted in, and now it will reverse the process.

    “I see it as one of many opportunities for kids to consider post-graduation,” said Porter, who opposes directories being released to any other group. “It’s a good career choice for some people.”

    Arlington’s assistant superintendent, Alvin Crawley, said that until now, the district has refused to release student directories to anyone, including military recruiters. This year, opt-out forms were sent to all 2,500 of the county’s juniors and seniors, he said, and 130 were returned. So far, he said, recruiters have requested the student directory for only one of the district’s three high schools, Yorktown.

    Jack Parker, principal of Potomac High School in Prince William County, said his school already was in the habit of giving names to military recruiters and letting them recruit on campus during lunch periods.

    “They are not trying to solicit anything,” Parker said. “And if a student doesn’t want to be called, we strike them off the list.”

    Christine Boehm, 17, who attends Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, is less concerned about privacy than about the expense of the unsolicited mailing she received from recruiters. “It’s a waste of government money,” she said. “I’m not planning on going into the military.”

    Kyle Geren, 17, said he has already been contacted by a military recruiter at home — and went to visit him. “I think it’s a good idea the recruitment office knows how to get hold of students before they leave school,” Geren said. “I’m keeping it open as an option.”

  • Military Recruiters Getting a Foot in Door: Federal Education Bill Requires High Schools to Share Student Data

    Published by the Boston Globe

    WASHINGTON – A little-noticed provision in a new federal education law requires high schools to provide names, addresses, and phone numbers of students to military recruiters. Schools that refuse to comply face losing federal education funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

    We opposed it primarily on privacy grounds, that students or parents should be able to control access to directory information, such as names, addresses, ages. That information shouldn’t be sent out to military recruiters unless parents want it sent out.

    Christopher Anders, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union Under the rule, part of the No Child Left Behind Act signed earlier this year, Pentagon recruiters are entitled to students’ contact information unless parents opt out of sharing the data, a requirement that has alarmed civil libertarians and school administrators.

    ”We don’t wish to appear antimilitary. The military is a great first step out of high school for a lot of kids, and it is a fine career for some people,” said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators.

    Nevertheless, the association opposed the provision because it took discretion away from local school boards. ”We weren’t happy because we’re a big local control outfit.”

    The law also requires high schools to allow military recruiters the same campus access as administrators give to colleges and job recruiters. Some schools, including those in San Francisco and Portland, Ore., had refused military recruiters access to their campuses on the grounds that the Pentagon discriminated against gays and lesbians.

    Education Secretary Rod Paige sent a letter last month to school administrators explaining the new regulations. Department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said the rationale for the rule was that the military ”felt this was needed to boost recruitment.”

    Major Sandy Troeber, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said the rules were ”brought about by congressional support for military recruiting efforts.” The Selective Service already requires men in the United States to register for the draft within 30 days of their 18th birthday.

    But a fact sheet provided by the Pentagon said that the cost of recruiting had doubled in the past decade and that ”access to students can significantly reduce the costs of recruiting.”

    The Pentagon had been trying for years to insert the recruitment provisions into education legislation to counter what they saw as a lack of cooperation from some high schools, according to lobbyists and congressional aides. But this year the education bill was so loaded with other contentious issues, such as school vouchers, funding matters, and testing standards, that lawmakers who might have fought the new recruitment rules had their energies focused on other provisions.

    ”It wasn’t on anybody’s radar. It was buried so deep in the legislation,” said Kathleen Lyons, spokeswoman for the National Education Association. The group has only recently begun studying the issue and hasn’t yet taken a position on it, she said.

    Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts and a major negotiator on the Leave No Child Behind Act, had fought successfully for several years to keep the military recruitment rules out of education bills, but couldn’t win the battle this year, especially since bigger education issues were dominating the debate, Hunter said. Senator Tim Hutchinson, Republican of Arkansas, engineered the inclusion of the new language, said a Kennedy staffer.

    ”All this provision does is provide military recruiters with the same access to directory information that colleges currently enjoy,” Kennedy said in a statement.

    Civil libertarians are concerned about the rule nonetheless.

    ”We opposed it primarily on privacy grounds, that students or parents should be able to control access to directory information, such as names, addresses, ages,” said Christopher Anders, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. ”That information shouldn’t be sent out to military recruiters unless parents want it sent out.”

    Under federal privacy laws, schools generally must have written permission from parents or students to release any information about a student’s education record, according to the Education Department. Exceptions include handing records over to a transfer school, to law enforcement in some cases, and to officials who need the information in cases of health or safety emergencies.

    Schools may release what is called ”directory information,” such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and date and place of birth, but they must also give parents the option of refusing disclosure of their child’s information. Schools can decide on their own whether to provide the directory information to outside individuals or organizations.

    The difference under the new rule is that schools will not have the discretion to refuse to provide such information to the military; they must provide the information to recruiters and allow them on campus at the Pentagon’s request.

    Groups such as the American Friends Service Committee and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, an antimilitary draft organization, have been fielding complaints about the new rules, but are not sure whether they can successfully challenge them, especially in the environment created by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Analysts are looking at whether the rules violate existing privacy law, said Oscar Castro, an AFSC official.

    Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, said the board’s attorneys are looking at the law to see whether the Bay Area school system can keep any part of its current written policy, which prohibits military recruiters from coming on campus and bars the release of any student information to military recruiters ”or anyone who asks for it.”

    ”We are very upfront about being biased in favor of higher education. We’re telling our kids, `go to college, go to college,”’ said Wynns, adding that schools do not allow businesses to recruit on campuses, either. The military has not yet asked for students’ contact information, but recruiters have demanded and recently been given access to San Francisco high schools for the first time in 12 years, she said.

  • U.S., Iraqi Students Exchange Letters of Peace

    Originally Published by the Ventura County Star, CA

    Dear Friend, My name is Fahad. First I want to thank you about your nice feelings toward our people in Iraq. Here in Iraq we love all peoples in the world and we try to help them if we could. All people in the world must not believe everything bad said about us in programs made specially to produce bad facts about Iraq.

    My students received this pen-pal letter from a student at the Al-Markaziya School for Boys in Baghdad. Earlier this month, I visited Iraq to deliver pen-pal letters from students in my “Solutions to Violence” classes, and now a friendship between two warring nations has the opportunity to bloom.

    The lack of intercultural communication between students in the United States and students in Iraq is troubling. All we know of them via mass media is that all 24 million Iraqis are equated with their one leader. All they know of us are 12 years of economic sanctions and no-fly-zone bombings.

    When I watch your movies on our black and white TV, I have many dreams to have a color TV, to see your real colors. Do you have the same face that we have? Do you have the same heart?

    The high-school-aged students have most often crossed my mind. When teaching about Iraq, I inquire as to the age at which my students had their first memories. Most students say somewhere around 3 to 5 years old. My students, most of whom are 15 to 18 years old, have grown up knowing leisurely lives, free from bombings, free to watch what they want on television and to buy what they want in shopping malls.

    I ask them to stand in the shoes of their same-age counterparts in Iraq. Imagine that since conscious memory, all they have known has been war. It’s a powerful exercise in empathy.

    Friday is my holiday. I don’t go to school, but I study for hours and hours to get to the medical college. Because of the embargo on our country, there’s no medicine for diseases, and many newborn kids and children are dying.

    Even more troubling to me are the youngest children, those 12 years and younger. They were born after the sanctions and after the Gulf War. They have known no life other than war. And the saddest part? It’s not at all their fault. They are being held hostage under a dictatorship they did not choose, captive and deprived of basic nutrition and access to education.

    I would like to tell you that all Iraqi people are against the idea of war. We believe in peace and that we have the right to vote our own leader.

    UNICEF reports that 80 percent of schools in Iraq are in desperate need of repair. Eight-thousand schools lack basic infrastructure and the basics to support education: no new textbooks since 1989, no chalk, no classroom repairs. Teachers’ salaries prior to the Gulf War were approximately $500 per month. They now earn $5 per month. Students are sent home to use the restroom because those at school pose too great a health risk. And the rate of primary school-aged girls dropping out has increased to 35 percent in the past 12 years.

    According to UNICEF, education is the only sector in Iraq that has shown no improvement since the sanctions were imposed in 1990.

    As a teacher, I am deeply concerned about the connections between education and war-making. Every penny we spend on weapons of mass destruction, every dollar that is diverted from academic enrichment to daisy cutters and pre-emptive strikes deprive American students of the right to a quality education.

    How enraging that our military recruits disproportionately in poor communities of color. How egregious that my students who cannot afford higher education must join the military to pay for their studies. This classist, racist policy glares at the American public who are too blinded by war talk to notice. We are sending poor people to kill poor people. Where is the democracy in that?

    So we are a people who like the peace and work to get it. Because whatever I say I can’t describe to you how much Iraqi people suffered after the war.

    Currently, the pen-pal letter exchange program, supported by Voices in the Wilderness and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, is the only one of its kind. No study abroad programs exist. All diplomatic ties with Iraq have been severed since the early 1990s. It is even illegal to travel there.

    Knowing this, how can we expect the youth of America to know that “our quarrel,” as so many governments have said, “is not with the Iraqi people.” If we don’t make the distinction, how will they?

    Education is the key to ending wars. Through this simple outreach of American to Iraqi students, young people are changing the world.
    *Leah C. Wells, a Santa Paula teacher, serves as peace education coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara. She recently paid a second visit to Iraq and opposes the economic sanctions and no-fly-zone incursions on that country.