The first few days following graduation passed very quickly. There were a few final minor things to do at the school, like cleaning out lockers, turning in their last books, and bidding farewell to their coaches. However, one of the more essential parts of graduating was getting their final transcripts to be sent to their college. But as the now ungraduated graduates found, getting their final transcripts was being blocked by the school, as Davis had warned he would do. There even was a sign posted outside the office that read, “Students who refused Program participation will not receive a transcript.”
The Marine JA office was ready to move on this problem, and during the week following the graduation ceremonies, the JA office requested a meeting between the school district’s officials and a group of Marine parents; most of the high-school students’ parents were members of the senior officer and NCO ranks and they attended in semi-dress uniform. At the meeting, Capt Donelley, the assistant judge advocate representing the Marine families, presented his arguments.
“This is the situation, for you ladies and gentlemen representing the school district. Under the state education law, any student who has met the academic requirements established by law for graduation and has not been expelled from school for cause is automatically entitled to graduate on completing the required credits and achieving the minimum grade-point average. That’s point one.
“Next, state education law does not recognize any federal requirement or prerequisite involving any academic or non-academic activity that can affect a student’s right to become a high school graduate. Third, any graduation requirement imposed on any student cannot be applied selectively to one group of students and exclude other students. If a graduation requirement exists, it must apply to all students equally, not to a randomly chosen subset of students.
“It’s possible that the consequences of not receiving an official statement of their graduation may not have any effect on some of our students, but it obviously greatly affects those students who need documentation of graduation for college admission. It’s also very possible that some consequences could be economic in nature. This means that by withholding their official transcripts, the district is creating an injury to these students, and the district is violating state law by not fulfilling the school’s duty to provide an education to these students by withholding the evidence that this education was received. Part of providing that education is the formal acknowledgment that the student successfully completed the education. And because the parents of virtually every student affected will be moving out of the state within a year or two as the service member is reassigned, it would make future resolution so much more difficult without incurring great expense.
“The next step that my office will take on behalf of these parents seated here, who represent all of our clients, will be to obtain a court injunction to compel the district to issue official transcripts to each student that clearly shows that, in every case, they have met their requirements for graduation. We will also explore the possibility of seeking damages, compensatory definitely, and punitive if possible. I’ve approached you in this informal manner so that you may avoid the costs, time, and bad publicity of an injunction and the large number of lawsuits we would file. Some two hundred fifty plus, I believe.”
The school’s attorney responded that the matter wasn’t under the school’s control as the federal Program office required the school to withhold graduation from students who failed to participate.
“That requirement, sir, is neither under the authority of that federal office—Social Awareness, I believe, nor does any such requirement exist in the enabling legislation that established that federal office. It’s an operational policy of that office to require schools to use the threat of non-graduation in an attempt to compel student participation, but in this state, at least, the state’s education laws take precedence over any procedure that the federal government might attempt to impose. If you had consulted the federal law itself instead of going solely by the Program’s policy guidebook, you would have seen that there is no provision in it that mandates that graduation is to be withheld for non-participation. That requirement is simply a policy of the Office of Social Awareness and is rendered void by this state’s laws. And consider that we would seek our injunction and sue in a state court, since it is state law that the school district has violated.”
There were a few more objections raised by the school’s officials but all were easily dismissed, and then Capt Donelley finished his statement.
“We will give you one week to issue the students’ official transcripts. We aren’t asking for their diploma certificates. You could interpret that the Program rule about not graduating means that it applies to the withholding of the students’ diplomas, although if you choose to provide those, I’m sure that my clients will be pleased to receive them. If these families do not receive the certified transcripts, properly annotated that all requirements for graduation have been met, we will move on to the next step: court proceedings. Consider the costs of having to respond to over 250 lawsuits.”
After the twins’ high school graduation, the Denison family turned their attention to their upcoming moves—the adults to Stuart’s next post at Camp Lejeune Marine base and the teens to their college. About ten days after their graduation, the mail brought certified copies of the twins’ transcripts. Everyone was amused to see that they were stamped, “Met all state graduation requirements; no diploma issued.”
“Look, they had to have a special stamp made for that,” Stuart snorted when he read it.
A few days before the end of June, Tom and Mitchell, his step-father, together with Roger, flew to Atlanta to look at some prospective rentals near their campuses. Roger’s dad would be leaving himself in two days to report to his new assignment, so Roger’s family got together with Tom’s for a farewell dinner several evenings before their departures. Finding a suitable apartment with two bedrooms and a usable kitchen proved to be more difficult than they had anticipated, however, but after three days of looking at prospective apartments, they found a very tiny one, about 600 square feet, within two miles of both campuses. It was clean, had limited furnishings, but was very cramped. After consulting with Cynthia and Ayame, and showing the place to them by video, they agreed to lease it. As Mitchell had predicted, their housing costs would be significantly lower than if they had used university housing.
Once the arrangements were finalized, the three returned to California and Roger pitched in with his sister and Ayame to pack the family’s house. It was a complicated job; there were three separate destinations for their household goods. Stuart’s and Sarah’s possessions comprised the largest amount. The twins’ furniture and other possessions that they didn’t need in college would go to storage near their parents’ new home, and the things that they would take with them to college was in the third group. Sarah, a veteran of many prior moves, organized the packing like a master.
The teens were undecided about how they would travel to Atlanta. Roger and Cynthia shared a car and Sarah didn’t want to house a third car at her new home; Tom had a car himself and wanted to have it in Atlanta. They discussed driving in two cars, but then decided to ship one car and the four would drive there in Tom’s, which was larger and newer. Then came moving day and the day of parting; Sarah was to fly out to North Carolina, shipping her own car, and the four teens left on their cross-country drive.
Their trip from southern California to Atlanta was uneventful; the teens took their time and even visited a few touristy sights during their trip east. Keeping in touch with their parents was simple too, and soon the twins were even able to have video chats with the Denisons in their new base housing. They made tentative plans to visit Camp Lejeune during their first holiday break, provided any sports competition conflicts didn’t occur to interfere with the plans.
Because of their scholarships, Roger and Cynthia had to arrive ten days before regular freshman registration for pre-season orientation, training, and making up their class schedules so that competition, practices, and training sessions would not interfere with academics. Since Tom and Ayame didn’t have anything official to do during those ten days, they got elected to unpack, set up the apartment, run various errands, and retrieve the twins’ car from the transport company.
Tom was in the industrial and facilities engineering program at Georgia Polytech and Ayame was in the pre-med program at Avery; the two schools were a little over five miles apart. Cynthia was considering a degree in education but was also interested in educational psychology, while Roger wanted to work with young people as a psychologist. From their apartment, it was an easy bike ride to either campus and convenient public transportation was also available so they wouldn’t need their cars for daily travel to campus. Class registration came, classes began, and soon they settled into a routine.
Since the twins had advanced class standing, they were entering their freshman year with a class standing between upper freshman and sophomore levels, so they were permitted to take several education prerequisite classes including a class called “Introduction to Principles of Education.” The course’s focus, according to the syllabus the twins had read, was to explore issues in schools and education through both student-centered classroom activities and by observing each of a series of elementary school classes, middle school classes, and a high-school humanities class and a science class. They were to write reports on their observations and in student-led discussions, they were to develop ideas for designing and implementing curriculum for the classes they observed, considering how those classes met standards of education, used methods of instruction, taught using different media, and assessed student progress, all based on their classroom observations. The university had a lab school, plus had access to two charter schools and two public high schools where the observations would take place.
After the first few sessions of that class, Roger was talking to Cynthia about it.
“Man, this is really advanced for an introductory class,” he remarked. “There’s stuff there that the prof will have to cover—like he speaks about ‘standards of education’ as if we know what that means.”
“Yeah,” Cynthia responded. “He did say that he expected us to work out what we thought the standards should be as we do our observations and discussions. We’re supposed to be analytical and develop a framework on which to base standards. I guess that’s why this class is a ‘gateway’ class; it’s supposed to see if the students are equipped to go on to the more difficult classes in ed.”
“We’ve gotta get used to learning in a whole different way,” he sighed. “No more learning only out of books, yeah, that’s what we were told, but facing it now is a real experience. Say, looks like our sports seasons almost overlap. We start training for real next week and competition finals are at the end of March; your basketball is the same.”
“Yeah, it’ll be hard to go to each other’s games and meets,” she agreed. “Well, at least the schedules don’t interfere with classes too badly. And another responsibility is that we’re supposed to mentor a high school team as an assistant coach, but that comes next year—as a second year on the team, fortunately.”
“Oh yeah, the men’s team does the same thing. We’re supposed to coach swimming starting next year too. That’ll be cool.”
The following Tuesday, Cynthia got home after a day that involved her observation of her assigned high-school class.
“Hi guys, guess what? I had my first observation in class today for our Intro to Ed class, and they’re running the damn Program in the high school. Bunches of naked kids in class, sex in the halls, masturbating in class—you know, Relief, all that shit,” she moaned. “I thought I was done with that crap.”
She put her head in her hands.
“Goddamn,” Roger sighed. “Yeah, so how can we develop any meaningful educational standards with that garbage interfering with the kids in the school, anyway? We stopped that stuff from happening in our high school, but it’s gotta affect how the kids learn.”
“Well, it sure as hell had an effect in the class I observed. I’m assigned to observe a science class, it’s sophomore biology, and it was sex—pure sex. Today the boy and girl—such young kids—had to demonstrate sexual response and they were made to stimulate each other until they came. They were scared, reluctant as hell, and totally embarrassed. I couldn’t watch; I had to leave the room. It wasn’t that they were doing anything physically harmful—I would have stopped them if I saw that—it was just awfully humiliating for them. That poor girl was crying. I had to speak to the teacher afterwards as part of my observation and I told him that I thought that doing that was totally obscene and perverted. He was surprised and asked me if I wasn’t aware of the Program and how teachers have to use the naked kids as teaching props.
“I told him I was and then explained how we had virtually shut it down at our school and he was really surprised at that. Then he told me that he noticed how his students’ overall performance had declined from before the Program started and how many kids weren’t concentrating in class, but all teachers were required to follow the Program curriculum and it left very few options to deviate from the planned lessons. Roger, I don’t know... We changed things at our school; how can we change the whole damned country now?”
“Hey, that reminds me, I wonder how that Tenth Amendment challenge is doing?” Roger commented. “I think I still have Capt Donelley’s email, I’ll shoot him a question about it.”
Later Roger reported: “So I sent an email; we’ll see if he gets back to us. But listen, you know what I found? A whole damned website devoted to the Program and kids can write up their experiences on a forum and tell about problems and stuff that’s happening in their schools! You gotta see this!”
All three of the teens hurried the six steps to Roger’s cramped bedroom and crowded around his computer.
“How are they keeping that site up?” Tom wondered. “The feds have shut down every other site up till now.”
“There’s a blog on the site. One of the entries says what they are doing to stay on line. Look, it’s here. They’re doing this tech stuff with proxy servers and hiding the location of the computer system that has the website on it. I didn’t think that anyone could hide a server on the web—I thought if you know its address, you can find it.”
“Normally that’s true,” Tom mused. “But this is really clever, how they set it up. There’s gotta be an organization behind this; it’s way too sophisticated for one or two people to run.”
“But look at the forum here, and those articles they call ‘First Person’ stories,” Roger went on. “I read a few and some are just awful. I saw two that mention suicides that were almost certainly because of the Program at those schools, and lots of kids talk about kids they know who were hospitalized. A number on anxiety drugs, like, um, Sandra? Remember her? And Dee mentioned kids on drugs at Central too. Before I got you in here I scanned several pages of these posts and none says anything good about the Program in their school—stands to reason, I guess, though.”
“Say, I wonder if the info here might be a good source for our Intro to Ed class,” Cynthia exclaimed. “If we’re supposed to cover educational standards—turn the tables on the Program by exposing its negative effect in achieving effective classroom management, meeting learning expectations, crap like that. If I can get the high school teachers to give me or show me pre- and post-Program class grades.... Yeah, that’d be really cool. Maybe we could use the forum there to see if the kids who write those posts could get similar info from their schools. Wow, that could turn into a kind of study, right? Hey, let’s do it! This is the kind of thing we were trying to do in the spring but were stymied because we couldn’t find contacts.”
“Damn, the people who set this up are geniuses,” Roger said reverently, as he paged through the forum posts. “See, we can categorize the kinds of problems by setting up search filters like this...” he demonstrated, “and see the posts that show up. These are all about forced humiliation. Let’s try forced sex... Okay, see, there are these. Man, this is really powerful. We need some kind of plan, though, or else we’re not going to have coherent results. Let’s figure out what this study is supposed to do, okay? Shit, I can’t move... you guys gotta get out so I can get off the damned bed!”
“Bring the laptop out here,” Tom called from the kitchen table. “At least we’ve got four chairs here. We need more room,” he groaned.
Ayame and Tom were fascinated with the idea of gathering grade data and volunteered to help with that work; Tom said he had made friends with a few students at his school who were strongly anti-Program, one whose sister had been raped when she was in the Program, and he thought they would want to help with anything that could show the social damage that the Program was causing.
That evening, the group came up with a plan to collect, as best as they could, information on two elements that the website could help in collecting. First, quantitative data on class performance would be sought. They realized that this information could be made up, but they decided that their message asking for the information would stress the fact that providing false data would be detrimental to the survey and do severe harm to its veracity. Second, a list of adverse social and psychological consequences as reported in the forum posts would be compiled, showing the frequency of reports of these occurrences.
Tom texted his friends with a brief summary and said he’d talk to them about the project the next day.
The following day, Roger and Cynthia mentioned their survey to a few friends who were in their Intro to Ed class; they were very interested in it too and at lunch, the twins filled them in on the project.
“You know I just began observing at Merritt High,” Cynthia told their friends.
“Yeah, after lunch I need to start my high-school rotation,” Rhonda replied. “And they have the Program—my high school hadn’t started it yet. I heard what you said about the bio class you were in. No shit, they made the kids do that to each other?”
“Yeah. I was hurtin’ for those kids, too. That’s what this survey’s about—how it disrupts classes and learning,” Cynthia responded.
“Well, I guess I’ll see it first-hand in a half hour,” Rhonda said, and then Cynthia got a text from Tom.
“mt u @ mitchs w/group about pgm 4pm?” referring to Mitch’s Coffee House, a popular college hangout that they frequented. She replied, “c u then.”
Rhonda and two others from their group said that they were able to go and would meet the others there. The twins arrived a little after 4 p.m. and found a group of six, four girls and two guys, talking to Tom, and after they joined the group, three more guys arrived, followed by Rhonda and the others.
Tom looked around. “I think this is everyone who’s interested in this project from Polytech.”
“And also from Avery,” Cynthia added. “There were two more gals interested in helping but couldn’t make it, so I’ll fill them in. Let’s introduce ourselves.”
When Rhonda introduced herself, she mentioned that she had just come from Merritt High School and had observed a psych class there, and four kids in the class were naked and in the Program.
“The teacher started the class and told them that there wouldn’t be a Relief time because of the topic of that lesson. Then he ordered the entire class to strip naked! A number refused, so he gave them an ultimatum, if they didn’t get naked, they would get zeros for participation for the whole week. Still three girls and two boys refused, so he gave them detention slips and sent them to the assistant principal.
“Then he looked at me—and told me that even though I was an observer, he needed one more girl because there was an extra boy in the class, so I had to strip too! I answered, ‘In your dreams. I’m not one of your students.’ He shrugged and paired up the students by boy and girl and paired that extra boy with me. He had all of the kids push the desks aside and form a circle in the empty space, standing boy-girl. I came up and stood there, not in the circle, but just outside it, and the boy stood next to me.
“Then he had each girl around the circle count off and he said that he’d refer to each girl-boy pair by their number. He explained that the project was to demonstrate the differences in response to sexual stimulation and the first step was for the boy to fondle his paired girl’s nipples! I instantly returned to my seat at the back of the room and sat, even though the teacher tried to get me to join in. The boy didn’t know what to do and looked around like he was lost. The teacher didn’t seem to know either, but then he told the kid to find a girl and fondle her other tit.
“After a couple of minutes, the girls were asked what they felt in stimulation on a scale of 1–5, none to maximum. Then the boys were asked to turn to the girl on his other side, and that girl was to fondle the boys’ nipples. The teacher repeated this, every two minutes, and progressed, alternating the boy-girl pairs, to sucking nipples, fingering pussies and cocks and then to cunt-licking and blow jobs! When it came to the oral parts, though, lots of kids just flat-out refused and the teacher just had them do the fingering with the other partner. And that lonesome boy was truly the odd-man-out.
“The teacher was keeping the couples’ scores on the board and I couldn’t make out head or tail what the numbers meant—it all looked so random. A few of the boys spouted but the teacher didn’t give much time, so when the class ended, lots of the boys had to dress still sporting hardons, shit, the complaints, and the moaning, and grousing! So after the class I asked the teacher what the lesson objective was supposed to be. He was evasive and said that it demonstrated how sexual excitement progressed according to how directly the sexual organs were stimulated.
“So I pointed to the numbers on the board and asked him to show me, using those numbers, how that the lesson objective was met. He looked at them and tried to find some relationship but couldn’t, and then came up with a lame excuse that the kids weren’t truthful in reporting their amount of stimulation! I had to laugh at that! I told him that this was a hare-brained excuse of a psych lesson and challenged him to prove to me otherwise; at that point I didn’t fuckin’ care what kind of report about me he was goin’ to send to our prof. I had taken a photo of the numbers on the board and with my notes from that session, I’m gonna skewer that particular lesson in my report about it. That’s why I’m so interested in what Cindy and Roger are trying to do.”
Roger looked around at the others who had been raptly listening to Rhonda.
“Cindy and I really feel that the Program is causing some terrible damage. Not only psychological damage to an unknown number of vulnerable kids, but damage to the learning settings in school. How can a bunch of horny kids—walking around being sexually stimulated all day—and then get lessons like Rhonda saw in that class—be expected to learn anything? So that’s what this stuff we’re trying to do is all about. The effect of the Program on kids’ learning and on any mental and social problems it causes.”
The project was discussed and thoughts and suggestions were offered, hammered out, and finalized, and after about 90 minutes, an overall plan was developed. Several people would work the forum and post requests, offer advice for how to get teacher cooperation to get grade data, and contact the website’s operators through its internal messaging function to explain their project, hoping that they would blog about it.
Another, larger group, the Polytech kids, would sift through the forum postings and categorize the various kinds of Program problems mentioned in the posts, separating them into first-hand and second-hand accounts. Everyone exchanged contact information, and one of the girls in Tom’s group offered to set up a private, password-accessible site in her college webspace with a database to collect the results.
That evening Roger found an email from Capt Donelley.
“Donelley replied, guys. He had good news and bad news, naturally. First, the good. Riverside County is holding Cirota on charges of second-degree murder; he had provided Ayame’s name to the kidnapers after having added her name to the Program list. Since she was not eligible to be in the Program, her kidnaping wasn’t what they called a ‘Program detainment.’ Also, two of the kids they rescued from the torture office were over 18 so those people who were running that place don’t have the Program law to protect them from kidnaping charges in addition to all the other charges against them. Their trials are set for January and Cirota’s is a few months later.”
“Way cool,” Tom pumped his fist. “Good to see justice working for once. So what’s the bad news?”
“The bad news, his office has dropped the constitutional question. He had contacted the ACLU in LA; they were interested in the idea but they’ve got a lot of other fish to fry, he says, and they weren’t sure if they could put any of their limited resources into a challenge. He said that he can’t do anything from the JA office because the instructions from his chief is that the Marines don’t want to be involved in pushing a constitutional issue. He wishes us luck and says it’s a great idea and we should try to find a champion to take on the challenge.”
“Well, it’s another thing we’ll just have to do ourselves,” Cynthia grinned. “Us against the whole country, right? Lousy odds. That’s the Marine challenge, Dad always says. When the odds are impossible, a true Marine finds a way to get the job done. So let’s do it!”
What the twins weren’t expecting was how quickly another challenge found them.
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