Among the students at San Fernando High School, a sun-baked campus in a poor, mostly Latino area on the northern fringe of the San Fernando Valley, the issue of military recruiting looms large.
The school sends hundreds more students to college than it does into the military, but still, according to senior Erika Preciado, "more recruiters are here for the military than for colleges."
The 17-year-old is co-editor of the school newspaper, El Tigre. In her journalism class this week, almost all of the students said they had been contacted by a military recruiter, and several said recruiters had been guest speakers in their classes or had talked to them at school events, such as one where recruiters brought a chin-up bar onto campus.
Seven of the 28 students said they knew someone who had died in Iraq while serving in the U.S. military.
The issue concerns the school librarian, Kitty Kroger, so much that she banned recruiters from placing their literature in the library and has waged a campaign to "make kids fully aware of what it would mean to be in the military."
Now the issue figures in a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District by a San Fernando High teacher who says the principal retaliated against him because he urged students to think critically about the military and the war in Iraq.
Alberto Gutierrez, a 33-year-old social studies teacher who is known on campus as a passionate educator with a left-wing tilt, says in a suit filed this week that after he "offered objective discussion
The teacher says he received only glowing performance reviews until two years ago, after he began teaching about the war.
At the same time, according to the suit, Rodriguez didn't object when another teacher required students to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, designed by the Department of Defense to measure aptitude for military service.
The suit contends that Rodriguez "strongly supports the United States' involvement in the war and adamantly opposes any other opinions."
Rodriguez, who has since been promoted to director of secondary services for one of Los Angeles Unified's local district headquarters in the Valley, denied those claims. He said he limited military recruiters' presence on campus to Wednesdays at lunch.
