On Monday, Kevin rode with Roger for early-morning swim practice; Kevin was spending much of his practice time building his endurance with wind sprints and improving his breast stroke. The first competitions were not to begin until December and Kevin hadn’t yet decided whether he wanted to compete.
“You can decide last minute, you know,” Roger had told him. “You are making steady improvement, you know. Say, if your times on freestyle and back consistently reach number three, I’ll be really pushing you to consider it, though.”
Kevin got to his home room classroom just as the morning’s announcements began. After the general announcements, the principal continued with a warning.
“Students, in light of the unauthorized article in last week’s newspaper, I want to assure you that there will be no change whatever in the Program and how it runs at Merritt. Soon I’ll announce the names of this week’s participants and I fully expect that you will cooperate. If you do not cooperate, you will not graduate when the time comes. The punishment for resisting will be two days of additional time in the Program for every day you resist; we may also consider suspension. I’ll read the names of the participating students now; when your name is called, please come to the office.”
He read the names; one of the students named was in the classroom. When his name was called, he sat up straight and then his face assumed a determined expression.
“Mr Jeffers, you were called,” the teacher pointed out.
“Yeah, but I’m not going anywhere,” he responded. “Not doing the Program.”
Soon the student who delivered the attendance report returned to the classroom.
“Guess what? Nobody showed up at the office—no one! Isn’t that sweet?” he reported.
Several minutes later, Leeds used the PA again to call for the week’s chosen participants to go to the office and repeated some of the consequences of not complying. Meanwhile, a few kids had been checking the social media.
“Look at all the reports on Facepage,” one said excitedly, “the resistance is at a lot of schools now; there are posts from different schools that say that lots of kids are refusing!”
“Sweet!” “Cool!” “Way to go!” rang out.
The class-change bell rang several minutes later; it was during the next class that a message arrived requesting that Kevin and Denise report to the office.
“Ah, well...” Denise sighed as they walked there. “What is it today, I wonder?”
“No idea,” Kevin replied.
Mr Leeds wanted to talk to them. After he invited them to sit, he began.
“Mr Winters had suspended you Friday because he holds the two of you responsible for the refusal of the students to take part in the Program. It’s clear that this all began as soon as you started school after your three months in that Korea program. But only a few minutes after you were suspended, we received a court order requiring us to drop the suspension. It’s as if you were prepared for it, how, I don’t know. Care to tell me?”
“Not really, sir,” Kevin said.
“Another thing. I’ve checked with your former school in North Carolina and learned that you actually helped the school make the Program a major success there. May I ask what’s going on?”
“We helped in our old school mainly because we didn’t know anything better,” Denise began. “Most of the kids were really scared. We had been selected for it, too, and had medical exemption reasons for not doing it, but Kevin found a way for us to participate but still keep the exemptions in place. But we saw things happen that really disturbed us.”
Kevin went on, “We explained this to Mr Winters. We told him we object to the Program on moral and philosophical grounds. I was opposed to it from the beginning but helped out only to support some truly terrified kids. As Denise said, our opposition is because of the effect the Program has on kids who can’t deal with the psychological pressure it causes. During the last year we learned, through a website that collected information about kids’ experiences, about the great harm it caused to quite a few students. Finally, a study came out last spring that gives pretty good evidence that academic performance is harmed when a school begins the Program—the students’ grades go down. Plenty of reasons to be opposed to it, in my book.”
“Mr Winters also had asked you to announce to the school that you’re withdrawing your opposition to the Program,” Leeds went on.
“He did, but we’re not doing that,” Denise responded. “We’re simply one voice among many who’re against the Program. We didn’t tell anyone that they had to refuse to participate.”
“So you won’t work with our school the way you did with your former school,” Leeds said flatly.
“Correct, sir,” Kevin agreed. “I’m actually sorry I had gotten involved in doing that. I found out that what we did caused more harm than good, actually. So we won’t be able to help at Merritt.”
“And do you know who substituted the anti-Program article in last week’s paper?” Leeds asked.
“It wasn’t written by anyone from the newspaper staff?” Denise asked. “I don’t even know how that publishing stuff works.”
“No, we can’t identify anyone in the school who did it,” Leeds answered. “Well, that’s all I wanted to talk to you about. I was hoping you’d have a change of heart.”
“No...” both answered.
“Get your passes then, and back to class. Good-bye,” he dismissed them.
On the way back to class, Kevin grinned at Denise.
“Good one, sweetie. How you evaded his direct question about the article.”
“Yeah, I learned how to do that from a master—you!”
That evening at home, Kevin and Denise were visiting in the upstairs apartment and chatting with Ayame and Roger when Cynthia and Tom rushed in, excited about the news reports that had been appearing about the Program.
“See the headline in the Atlanta Sentinel? ‘USA Schools’ Naked Programs are Stripped’!” Tom chortled. “Wow, what an awesome headline!”
“Yeah, and the article is pretty damned good, too!” Cynthia exclaimed. “Listen:
Already reeling from its ignominious scandal last fall, today the federal Naked in School Program was handed yet another major setback, this time at the hands of its intended victims, the students themselves. In a viral campaign that has rapidly spread through the USA, high-school students throughout the nation turned the tables on school administrators, and instead of being forced to strip naked to go to classes, the students stripped the schools of their Program participants, willing or otherwise.
The resistance movement against the Program seems to have arisen recently in a local high school in Atlanta; last Friday the Merritt High School’s Monitor published an article detailing many of the Program’s ills and suggesting methods the students could use to defy the school’s requirement to participate. Within minutes of the newspaper’s release, copies of the article began appearing on blogs and social media sites, and students around the USA took notice.
Merritt High School is not the only high school in the USA to have mounted an anti-Program campaign; student resistance movements have appeared at a few other schools as well but those movements have stayed in their local communities. It appears that the resistance in those schools have mostly worked because those schools draw from a large population of military families and most military parents seem to have supported the Program resistance at their school. However, today’s national examples of Program opposition are the first cases of the movement getting such widespread attention.
The Sentinal has asked officials at Merritt High School to comment on the Program resistance and to make the author of the anti-Program article available to be interviewed but our requests have been unsuccessful. When the Naked in School Program was operating in Merritt...
“The article goes on to talk about how the kids were picked, how the Program worked, and stuff like that,” Cynthia finished.
“That’s so cool,” Kevin exclaimed. “So the resistance that’s finally working is the one that’s using the techniques you guys developed with the Marines—it’s an offensive campaign...”
“Yeah, taking the battle to the foe,” Cynthia broke in, “that’s how the Marines fight and win. Well, we’ve got the Program beaten down pretty well. Now even the media seems to be on the anti-Program side.”
“Got an idea,” Tom said.
“Hey, your last one was super, Tom, so what did you think of now?” Roger asked.
“Well, at Polytech there’s this student-run journal; it’s called American Civics, and it carries essays and studies about contemporary issues in society and government. You know the study on student grades that Cindy and Roger did for their Ed class in the spring? And how my group did the parallel survey of the kinds of problems kids in the Program faced? We could take the white paper we posted on Kevin’s anti-Program website and turn it into a sociological article and I bet they’d publish it. We could highlight the social problems that the Program causes—rape, child porn, exploitation by teachers, sexual abuse, psychological damage—stories about all those things were in the forum. The stuff the journal prints is opinion-based, so we can use anecdotal information.”
“Wow,” Kevin remarked, “that sounds really good, Tom. When the media gets their hands on that, they’ll have a field day and it’ll make even more damage for the Program.”
“Good; I’ll look for the data for the stuff we did and see who wants to help turn it into an article.”
“Say, to change the subject,” Cynthia put in, “I like how you can come upstairs so easily now.”
“Yep,” Denise agreed, “and you’re always welcome to come down to visit, too. I haven’t asked Mom about the nudity yet, though—of course there’s nothing stopping you guys from being nude up here anytime you want.”
“Y’know? It feels funny thinking about that now.” Roger reflected. “While we were in a nudist environment, talking about being nude at home felt so right. Now that we’re here, the idea seems a little strange. Let’s think some more about it, okay?”
They all agreed to discuss further whether they wanted to bring a nudist lifestyle into their home life.
Copyright © 2015 Seems Ndenyal. All Rights Reserved.