School days...good old golden rule days

Please vote NO on H.R. 5295, a dangerous bill that would severely weaken the civil liberties of our young people. H.R. 5295 -- which has not been vetted by the committee process -- would make it far too easy for school officials to conduct or request mass searches of students when only one or a few students are suspected of anything. I attended Newfield H.S., on Marshall Drive, Selden, NY which had the first JROTC Marine Corps in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War (undeclared by Congress) and it was touted as an alternative to the Draft, for which I was eligible, some of the last (Class of 1971 wasn't). Quite a number of times, it was said, locker searches were performed because of "bomb scares" called in. Ironically, Selden is named after the judge, who, breaking judicial taboo, was a character witness at Susan B. Anthony's voter fraud trial. She had posed, not for the recent US $1 coin, but as a man to vote in an election Upstate. I did some research on the JROTC, the Army in CT, the Navy and Air Force on the West Coast. My father was a US Army veteran (one of five brothers in the services in WWII, one at Normandy) and my mother's brother, my uncle, did two tours in the Korean War. My cousin who directed "Huntley and Brinkley" was an Army Captain in Korea, and became an award winning producer for NBC News in New York, dividing much of his time between Houston, the "Space Race" and Saigon, the Vietnam theater before producing the coverage of both major party's conventions in 1976 for CBS. His eulogy was read in the UN Chapel by Edwin Newman. The PBS "Defense Monitor" said the JROTC costs over $1 billion and is in mostly poor school districts. I feel, if this be the case and even larger expenditures are spent today on JROTC, we should not be conducting the mass searches of students, as lockers were once, in my experience. Campus unrest as it was then, unfortunately leading up to the shootings at Kent State and the Attica prison "police riot" should be examples we can learn from and not precipitate. - "eligible" I had a Selective Service number drawn from a lottery invented by a New York State legislator which determined if I had to report for processing or not.