The parents of children — yes, it bears remembering that we’re talking about children here — at Garfield High School in Seattle are concerned that the United States is spending $4 billion per month on the war in Iraq burdening school districts and requiring them to cancel courses costing as little as $12,500 to produce (i.e., teaching and administrative costs). To add insult to — literally — injury, recruiters troll the school looking to find new fodder for the President’s cannons.

So the Parent-Teacher Association, whose mission is to protect and defend kids — the group frequently speaks out on children’s health, violence and other serious issues for that reason — recently voted 25 to 5 to ban recruiters from the high school campus.

The Bush Administration’s response, like it’s response to every other type of resistance, whether domestic or foreign, is to turn up the heat. You might say they want to “liberate” the children from their parents.

And it turns out the Bush Administration really means it when they say “no child left behind.”

Smith [a US Army spokesman] also pointed out the legality of military recruitment activity on campuses. “The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to let us have access to these students,” he says. — Can High Schools Ban Recruiters? (May 18, 2005) CBS News Online.

The school has joined in. In response to the Parent-Teacher Association’s resolution, the school has reinforced its policy allowing recruiters access to the children.

As the PTA notes, there’s nothing in their resolution that prevents kids from signing up and there is already a recruiting office near the school. But with the military increasingly lying and cheating in order to obtain more American children to throw at Iraqi bullets — for some reason, the subjugated Iraqis show themselves less willing to do so, or perhaps the American diet just makes our kids’ bodies better at stopping bullets — the PTA doesn’t want them invading high schools.

Fourteen-thousand high schools nationwide already administer the ASVAB. The ASVAB is sort of an SAT for the military for those rare recruiters that don’t tell high school drop-outs and drug addicts to lie about their past.

Some people — no doubt stupid Americans who just hate our country — apparently think that 14-to-18-year-olds just aren’t mature enough to decide whether to break up their families by donating their bodies to the Bush Family.

Personally, I think it shows the genius of the Bush Plan. A few more years of this and teacher-student ratios will be optimized without the need to raise taxes.

After all, we can’t fund an endless oil war and satisfy our domestic needs, too.