The 91-year-old program is a casualty of the war in Iraq, deep-seated anti-war views, and the city's pro-gay sentiments.
Not many students, even at San Francisco's prestigious Lowell High School, are already wide-awake and hard at it before 7:45 a.m. and their first regular classes of the morning.
Except Gloria Banh.
The 17-year-old Lowell senior often shows up early. On one typical mid-winter school day, there she was outside in San Francisco's bracing cold and fog, running two freshmen and a sophomore through a precision drill routine. When that was done, she went inside, not to rest, but to study for an advanced course in economics.
Gloria has participated in the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps since she started at Lowell, one of two San Francisco public high schools with a competitive academic admissions system. Now, she may be one of the last JROTC students to graduate in the San Francisco Unified School District.
The local school board voted 4-2 in November to eliminate the program by 2008, calling it an unwanted symbol of militarism and the war in Iraq that had no place in the public high schools of one of the country's most progressive cities.
About 1,600 kids at seven city high schools, about ten percent of the district's students, participate in JROTC. Supporters want to reverse the decision, but unless that happens, it appears San Francisco will become the first and only school district in the country, as far as anyone can be sure, to give JROTC the boot on political grounds.
Gloria Banh, for one, can't understand it.
She credits her obvious self-confidence and academic drive in part to her service as a JROTC exhibition drill team commander.
"Before I would not talk (publicly)," she said. "Now I'm actually comfortable before a crowd."
Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's mayor, said he couldn't understand the school board's move, either. But even he is powerless to change the decision, which also has been unpopular with such local political powers as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a former San Francisco mayor, and new state Attorney General Jerry Brown, a JROTC alumnus, former California governor, and, most recently, mayor of Oakland, San Francisco's neighbor across the bay.
"The notion of the new left is decentralization. It's choice. It's diversity. All four of those principles were fundamentally violated by the school board," Brown told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders.
Feinstein issued a statement: "I am shocked and surprised. This is a big mistake. ROTC offers young people learning and discipline, both of which are necessary ingredients for a successful life. What is happening to this city?"
A spokesman for Pelosi said the Speaker "is very concerned that the elimination of this program will end much-needed opportunities for low-income and disadvantaged young people."
Newsom said the school board put anti-war ideology ahead of student interests, but admits he has little chance to change minds.
National Attention
The school board vote drew national attention—an early sign, perhaps, that the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, and discontent with the Pentagon's "don't ask-don't tell" policy in gay-rights bastions such as San Francisco, might be stirring some trouble in the nation's high schools.
"We obviously are not going to be where we are not wanted," said J. D. Smith, program manager for the Navy's JROTC command, based in Pensacola, Florida, which has programs in 616 high schools including one in San Francisco.
But if San Francisco's action reflects a new movement, it's been slow to gain traction beyond the Bay Area. Nationally, there were 488,000 kids in JROTC programs in the 2005-2006 school year. About 700 schools are on the waiting list for programs they'd like to start.
JROTC is a fully funded Department of Defense program run by each service and authorized by Congress starting in 1916, which is also when it started in San Francisco. The cost to the military works out to about $680 per kid per year.
Both critics and supporters of JROTC are portraying San Francisco as a unique example of anti-military, pro-gay sentiments vanquishing the ordinarily potent defenses of a program with deep, 91-year roots and a disciplined army of backers.
San Francisco is hardly the only big city with a large gay population, predominantly liberal elected officials, and regular protests against the Iraq war. Nor is it the only place where there has been opposition to the military presence in local schools.
Yet San Francisco does seem to be the only place, so far anyway, where the precision drills, color guards, and lesson plans of the JROTC have been drawn into the crosshairs of anti-war politics.
"This is counter to the trend we have seen," Smith said. "We don't have the resources to be in as many schools as have sought to have a program."
Bill McHenry, Smith's counterpart in charge of the Marines' high school program, based in Quantico, Virginia, said communities elsewhere may have welcomed word of San Francisco's ouster of JROTC because they hope it will free up revenues to expand their own programs.
Mayor Daley and Jesse Jackson
He cited the Chicago schools as a prime example. With the backing of Chicago's Democratic political elite, including Mayor Richard Daley and veteran civil rights leader the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Marine Corps is creating its first math and science academy in Chicago, expected to serve 650 educationally disadvantaged youngsters.
In Chicago, McHenry said, "they're very liberal, but they're not ideologues."
"They haven't chosen to make the program an icon. They view the program for what is, which is something that's good for kids."
Statements like that draw fierce opposition in San Francisco, and some in the anti-war movement laud the city's move against JROTC as an unprecedented act of bravery.
Rick Jahnkow is program coordinator for the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities, a San Diego County-based nonprofit that tries to counter military recruiting ads.
He said other school districts have allowed JROTC contracts to lapse over the years, but always because of economic factors and declining enrollment. School districts have to pay half the program's local cost. JROTC essentially serves as an alternative to physical education classes during the first two years of high school, after which it becomes an elective program.
In other districts, anti-war sentiments sometimes have contributed to declines in JROTC enrollment, such as in Los Angeles and Massachusetts, Jahnkow said. But San Francisco seems to be the one place where a program stayed popular with the kids but was rejected by the adults.
"I am not aware of another school district that has disbanded a JROTC program on the simple grounds that it didn't want a militaristic program in the schools," Jahnkow said.
He predicted it will be difficult for activists in other communities to repeat the San Francisco result. Across the country, he said, JROTC has proven to be a tough survivor.
"It's not just a class where students go and exist passively. It's a very active program that markets itself and promotes itself," he said. "It has a very developed structure, and that becomes a formidable lobbying force."
Students and Parents Protest
In fact, hundreds of San Francisco JROTC participants and alumni, along with their family members and community supporters, packed the school board meeting when the vote was taken in November to end the program. Despite teary protests from students and parents, board members insisted that JROTC had to go.
They promised to replace it in a couple years with a quality alternative, perhaps linked to the city's police or fire departments, which board members said should be capable of delivering the same benefits—if not quite the same military spit and polish.
Board member Eric Mar said no one plans to abandon the youngsters who wanted JROTC to stay. A task force is being appointed to establish the successor program before JROTC is phased out and current participants move on.
"My goal is to create alternatives that are nonmilitary and nondiscriminatory as well," Mar said. "As a school board member I'm committed to working with current JROTC students, teachers, and others to come up with alternatives that are at least as good as or better than what we now have."
Two of his colleagues who also voted against JROTC, Dan Kelly, who has since left the board, and Mark Sanchez, now board president, laid out their rationale in an op-ed piece published in the San Francisco Chronicle. They made it clear that Iraq wasn't the only reason they took bold action.
They cited episodes of hazing, "group ostracism," and homophobic comments directed against anti-JROTC students; complaints that some youngsters were coerced into signing up; too much emphasis on "rote repetition" rather than critical thinking in the JROTC curriculum; and "funding inequities."
The armed forces contribute half the salaries of JROTC instructors, who are paid on average $105,000 annually in San Francisco, versus $60,000 for regular teachers in the district, even though the JROTC instructors have fewer students. Resentments also arise because JROTC is financed at the district level, rather than falling under each school's budget process.
Still, school finances and curriculum details clearly were not the main reasons JROTC was told to leave San Francisco. Board members Kelly and Sanchez spelled this out, writing that the most important factor, in their minds, was a matter of clashing ideologies.
"JROTC's primary reason for existence is to be a national vehicle for military recruitment," they claimed.
JROTC has been the subject of 20 years of simmering debate in San Francisco, whose left-leaning "San Francisco values" didn't just spring up overnight. But JROTC outlasted all past challenges, surviving in a series of 4-3 votes.
Past school boards narrowly voted to keep the program around, not because the board members liked it, but rather because of its unarguable popularity in the city schools.
Times have changed.
Citing a litany of objections to the war in Iraq, today's San Francisco school board opinion leaders argued that "larger questions" about U.S. foreign policy and the Iraq situation "tip the balance" against JROTC.
The program's instructors and administrators insist they aren't in the schools to spur active-duty enrollment in the armed forces, contrary impressions notwithstanding. They couch the program as an extension of the military's service mission at home, and say it provides a niche in which some students excel, in the same way other students excel in debating clubs or auto shops.
"It's not about teaching military skills," said Doug Bullard, one of the instructors at Lowell High School. "There's nothing tactical, nothing with weapons, nothing about moving squads in a tactical situation."
Self-Esteem, Leadership, Responsibility
The JROTC curriculum emphasizes such things as self-esteem, leadership, conflict resolution, and personal responsibility. A certain percentage of youngsters winds up joining the military after graduation, and some students take advantage of a head start offered for college ROTC programs. But program leaders say the numbers are surprisingly small, suggesting that if JROTC is a recruitment program, it's not working very well.
"This is a citizenship and leadership program," Smith said at the Navy JROTC command. "We are not rewarded by the number we take into the military—it's how many finish high school."
Independent evaluations of JROTC as an educational entity are hard to find. Most studies tend to reflect the biases of their authors and financing sources, as was discovered in 1999 when the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a well-regarded national security think tank in Washington, D.C., surveyed the literature in preparation for its own study.
That effort led to what appears to be the only recent critique of the JROTC program based on hard evidence, including school performance data, testimony from educators, surveys, and focus groups, as well as field studies of JROTC programs in Chicago, Washington, and El Paso, Texas.
The CSIS study, which was financed by foundation grants, set out to be "an objective evaluation," but clearly gave the program the benefit of the doubt. Study authors wrote that they started with the hypothesis "that JROTC benefits the students involved and the communities in which they live, but we wanted to let the facts as we uncovered them tell the story."
Results suggested that JROTC was "clearly a success story," helping many disadvantaged youth achieve sound academic results in a cost-effective manner.
"For the armed forces, JROTC's importance lies not in its effect on recruitment, but in its role as a bridge between military and civil society in an era when these two elements tend to diverge," the report concluded.
Such arguments, even if backed up in this case by survey data and test scores, hardly convinced some San Francisco educators such as Gail Dent, who taught 39 years in the city's public high schools before she retired.
She backed the school board vote, she said, largely because she found the JROTC curriculum was either mediocre in quality or duplicative of what was already being better taught elsewhere in the schools.
JROTC instructors are drawn from the ranks of retired military personnel. They aren't required to hold teaching credentials in particular subjects, as are most other public high school teachers.
Dent emphasized that she had "a lot of respect" for the San Francisco JROTC instructors that she encountered over the years. She also had some serious reservations, beyond the quality of any individual instructors.
"I don't think the military ought to be teaching government," she said. "I don't think the military ought to be teaching history. Those are the foundations of democracy. There should be separation between the military and civilian society."
In many ways, the San Francisco school board vote may have been the inevitable result of a growing separation between the Bay Area and its own maritime past.
The seaside city has long prided itself on its Navy heritage. Base closures, however, have pretty much ended the military's active-duty presence in the Bay Area. And not many military retirees can afford the sky-high housing costs.
Relations Strained
Moreover, relations between the military and San Francisco, one of the country's highest profile centers of anti-war activity, have become more and more strained in recent years.
In December last year Secretary of the Navy Donald C. Winter canceled plans to commission a warship in San Francisco. Retired Marine Corps Major General J. Michael Myatt, who chaired a committee organizing a commissioning ceremony for the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island (LHD-8), told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Navy was concerned by the anti-military tone of local politics, including statements by local political leaders, the school board's vote on JROTC, and the city's previous refusal to provide a homeport for the retired battleship USS Iowa (BB-61).
In 2005, the city Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 against the Iowa homeport plan of a nonprofit group, citing among other things "don't ask, don't tell."
Frequent battles also have erupted over pollution cleanups on former Navy bases, with the military accused of foot-dragging at Treasure Island and Hunters Point. The Chronicle editorialized that Pentagon stalling had turned the notion of adaptive reuse into "a cruel civic joke."
The SS Jeremiah O'Brien, a Liberty ship launched in 1943, and other floating relics of the World War II era try to keep military history alive along the San Francisco waterfront. Yet the sea lions that haul out at Pier 39 seem to be a much hotter tourist draw these days.
Everybody still goes for an occasional display of firepower by the Blue Angels. Men and women in uniform patrol the Golden Gate Bridge when terror alerts are sounded. Soon enough, however, barring an unexpected change of heart by school administrators, Gloria Banh's early-morning drills will be as passé in San Francisco as knickers and sock hops.
Mr. Hall, a veteran newsman, is a science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He has been a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau and economics writer at USA Today.