San Francisco sneakily applies slow poison to JROTC

In another of those hastily called School Board meetings — a tactic used to ensure that JROTC supporters will be less likely to attend the meeting — the SF School Board cut the legs off the JROTC program by denying it PE credits:

San Francisco public high schools will no longer award physical education credit to students enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, the Board of Education voted Thursday in a hastily scheduled meeting.

The 4-1 vote will likely cripple the 90-year-old military education program that serves 1,200 students because most use it to satisfy their PE requirement.

“If students really love the program, they’ll take it anyway,” said board President Mark Sanchez, who has led opposition to JROTC because of its ties to the military.

Gregory Wing, who will be a sophomore at Lowell next semester, said he loves JROTC, but the board’s vote “messes everything up for incoming freshmen and sophomores” who have no room in their schedules for the required PE and for JROTC.

“It’s completely unfair,” he said. “What am I going to do for credit?”

His sentiments echoed those of a dozen school-age cadets and others who argued that the district made its decision too quickly, and that students in the military program are actually more fit than students in regular PE.

Apparently when you embrace pacificism, as these Board members I’m sure do, you’ve given yourself license, not to fight fair and square, but to engage in duplicitous, backstabbing, down and dirty tactics to destroy a much-loved program that is well-supported within the community.

Frankly, there is a reason I know several San Francisco families who pay huge fortunes to educate their children at private schools within the City or even outside of the City, in the more tradition-bound suburbs.  Even if they agree with the Board’s political ideology (and, sadly, so many do), they still have a sense of revulsion at the rotten product a highly politicized school board creates.