The Times-Tribune February 5, 2006
Uncle Sam Wants Youth
Military an attractive option for rural Susquehanna kids
By Josh Brodesky
SUSQUEHANNA — Curtis Carpenter was hoping the war in Iraq would be over by now. The senior at Susquehanna High School enlisted in the Army National Guard last summer.
“I knew that school wasn’t really my thing,” he says. “I didn’t want to sit around and find a dead-end job.”
After he graduates, he’ll ship out June 26 and may very well do a tour in Iraq.
At a time when the Army is short on new recruits, rural youth like Mr. Carpenter, 18, are in the Army’s sights.
Mr. Carpenter is one of more than two dozen students from Susquehanna to join the military in recent years.
The school has one of the region’s higher enlistment rates. From 1998 to 2004, 28 of its students, about 5.85 percent of its graduates, enlisted upon graduation. This year four students have already signed up.
The school district is also one of the poorest in Northeastern Pennsylvania, with a 2004 median household income of $31,553, according to Standard & Poors.
That reflects a trend playing out across the state and nation.
Driven by lack of opportunities and drawn by the career and education benefits the military can offer, students from rural, low-income areas are enlisting at higher rates than their peers at urban schools, according to a 2004 analysis of Pentagon data by the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group.
The study shows 64 percent of the nation’s 2004 recruits were from counties with median household incomes below the national average. Of the 20 counties with the nation’s highest recruitment rates, 18 are considered rural. Pennsylvania’s 15 counties with the highest enlistment rates meet the state’s definition of rural.
The draw, military experts and educators say, is a mixture of patriotism and opportunity.
At Susquehanna, however, the relationship goes deeper. Recruiters are a part of the educational fabric and aim to serve as role models.
Recruiters bring coffee and doughnuts for the staff, make presentations in classrooms and have served as emergency substitutes when teachers were snowed in, principal Michael Lisowski says.
Why are they so welcome?
In part because Mr. Lisowski sees how his students grow in the military. Although some question the educational link between recruiters and schools, Mr. Lisowski sees students who come back sharper, stand taller, have better manners and a sense of direction.
“Kids go away to service, and they come back an extremely different product,” he says.
As such, he lets the military play a greater role in his school than some do in other schools.
The school’s halls are a monument to area soldiers. One glass case in the lobby lists the graduates, staff and students who served or signed up for the military. Curtis Carpenter’s name is in that case.
Another case, adorned with American flags and photos, honors seven area soldiers killed in Iraq. None attended Susquehanna, but Mr. Lisowski was so moved by their sacrifice he had to honor them.
“How could we not fuss over them?” he says. “We are very receptive to anybody with the military. It’s our view that improving a strong volunteer Army is much better than conscripts.”
Limited opportunity
Tucked in the shadows of the Endless Mountains, Susquehanna Community School District is about 10 minutes from the New York border. The region is pocked with stone quarries, but shows few other signs of industry.
“There’s such little to do around here,” says Chris Serra, 18, who has enlisted with the Marines.
The closest public college is Broome Community College outside of Binghamton, N.Y., about 25 miles north. Few of Susquehanna’s students go there, because they’d have to pay out-of-state tuition, says George Moore, a guidance counselor and former teacher who has been at Susquehanna for 32 years.
For students searching for direction who may not be ready for a four-year school, the military often makes the most sense, Mr. Moore says.
“Not every student is college bound right out of high school,” he says. “It tends to work out really good for them. … We don’t discourage military recruiters. Most of them are role models.”
Many recruiters describe themselves in the same light.
“I’m a career counselor,” says Sgt. 1st Class James Ditchey, of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.
Barrel-chested and friendly, he will soon be overseeing the Guard’s recruiting effort for Northeastern Pennsylvania. He was the recruiter who found Mr. Carpenter, and the two first met when Mr. Carpenter was in eighth grade.
Sgt. Ditchey, 36, has been with the Guard the last six years, first with the Army and then the Army Reserve.
“You get to see them grow from a 17-year-old kid to a lot of the guys in Iraq (who are) now trained combat veterans,” he says.
Yet, he’s also selling more than direction.
Six of Sgt. Ditchey’s soldiers have died in Iraq, five of them in a roadside bombing in September. All are honored in Susquehanna’s halls.
While the losses have lingered, Sgt. Ditchey’s recruiting effort has remained undeterred with a focus on opportunity and direction. Unlike the area’s active Army and Army Reserve recruiters who each have goals of two recruits a month, Sgt. Ditchey says he doesn’t have a quota. Still, he spends most of his time in the region’s rural districts because that’s where enlistments are most likely.
“Up here in the rural schools, you get more acceptance by the school districts,” he says. “They realize a lot of these kids don’t come from money.”
Close friends with Mr. Lisowski, Sgt. Ditchey often visits Susquehanna.
“It seems like I’m there every day,” he says.
That’s a sharp contrast to high schools like Dunmore and Abington Heights, which had the two lowest recruitment rates in the region from 1998 to 2004. Officials at these schools say recruiters come on campus about four times a year. They usually set up information tables and kids approach them.
When Sgt. Ditchey visits Susquehanna, he’s not always standing behind a table. He’s often in the classrooms leading Guard-sponsored presentations.
The presentations come from the Guard’s “You Can School Program,” are generally filled with PowerPoint slides and last about 45 minutes. There are 30 topics. Some are socially oriented: “Conflict Resolution,” “Violence Prevention.” Others are practical: “Budgeting Basics,” “Goal Setting.” And still others have loosely defined, politically charged names: “Freedom,” “Patriotism.”
Most parents have not objected to the military presence in schools. But that raises red flags for Montrose resident Michael Santella.
“Let’s just say hypothetically the Army comes in and says we want to hold an assembly,” he says. “Now should you force a student to attend that assembly? I don’t think so. If it’s serving no educational value or is wrapped up in something educational. … I don’t want my child to be involved in it.”
Mr. Santella served in the Navy and has organized a Montrose chapter of the liberal organization Democracy For America. The group has 21 members between Montrose and Scranton/Clarks Summit.
He became an activist against school recruitment after President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. The act has a provision that requires secondary schools to release student contact information to the military. If they don’t, they lose federal funding. Parents can sign an opt-out form at the beginning of the school year, but many don’t.
“It just virtually paves the way to unimpeded military access to our students,” he says. “They’re ripe for solicitation at that age.”
Army recruiting shortfall
It’s been widely reported that at the end of fiscal 2005 the active Army was 6,627 recruits short of its annual goal of 80,000. The Army Reserve and the National Guard fell 16 and 20 percent shy of their goals, respectively.
How the shortfall will affect the military is unclear. A recently released study by the National Security Advisory Group, which was founded by members of the Democratic Party, describes it as an impending crisis. The fear is should retention rates — which have been steady — fall and the shortage of new recruits continue, the Army won’t have enough troops to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has characterized the shortage as minor in lieu of the military’s size. It lauds the steady retention rates as an achievement.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonpartisan Virginia-based think tank, says the Army has struggled to fill recruits while other branches have not. He characterizes the Navy and Air Force as relatively safe moves. Those who join the Marines, he says, do so because, like Susquehanna’s Chris Serra, they want to go to war.
For years, the Army has billed itself as a stepping stone to opportunity: A chance to pay for college; a place to find direction, to be all a person can be.
Those tangible benefits are undermined by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Mr. Pike says, “You have not just one, but two opportunities to get your butt shot off.”
To meet recruiting requirements the Army has hired a new advertising firm, and is focusing on enlistment rates. The campaign is crafted after the Marines, and its motto of the few and proud, Mr. Pike says.
“They’re marketing a product, OK,” he says. “It’s a kind of unusual product in the sense that the product is an opportunity to come home in a Glad bag. … (but) they relentlessly understand who it is that joins.”
Dollars and sense
Enlistment bonuses are rising. First-time enlistments are often enough to buy a new car, and re-enlistments for those with specializations can reach six figures, Mr. Pike says. Susquehanna’s Curtis Carpenter says his signing bonus was $19,000 for a four-year hitch.
At the same time, the Army’s enlistment standards have dropped. The Army is taking more and more “Category IV” recruits, which come from the lowest aptitude levels accepted. Although up to 2 percent of all its troops used to come from this group, the Army recently began allowing up to 4 percent.
“The Army has always done what is necessary to win,” Mr. Pike says. “If it takes getting themselves a new ad agency, and if it takes putting more recruiters in the areas that are known to have a higher propensity to enlist. … they’ll do it.”
The new campaign seems to be working. The National Guard Bureau released a statement last week that it exceeded its recruiting goal of 12,605 for the last three months of 2005. Recruiting goals are based on the federal fiscal year, which begins in October.
As for why rural youth are more likely to enlist, Mr. Pike says he doesn’t know and “would not pretend to know.” He notes, however, the two have long been linked, and characterized it as a likely mixture of patriotism, politics, lifestyle and opportunity.
“The Army’s recruiting pattern has been ‘It’s a good career move,’” he says. “There are not many good career moves in a small town. … What do you do when you get into the Army? You spend a lot of time outdoors shooting guns. I think it only makes sense for somebody from a small town to say ‘This works.’”
Mr. Pike also says the chances of dying in a car accident for youth are greater than dying in Iraq, so the career potential outweighs the risk.
When Sgt. Ditchey is asked questions about Iraq, he uses the same comparison: “You have a better chance to get killed in your car.”
For Mr. Carpenter, that’s a chance he’s willing to take.
“Say I get out of the military,” he says. “If I still want to go to college, they’ll pay for it.”
© Copyright 2006, The Times-Tribune
