Huh, we had 7 for our school district (one for each branch, and I think the army and navy had two), but my high school alone did have just under 3000 kids.
We had all 7 of these guys (and one woman) going from class to class every day for a month giving four 90-minute presentations per day to pander and force-feed each individual classroom of ~30-50 students a glorified recruitment ad. They even set up one of the portable classrooms as a recruitment office for that month.
I’m curious, did the recruiters hand out forms to kids under 18 that required parent/guardian signatures?
I’m asking because ours did, and I could swear that these forms were a sort of pre-enlistment contract that needed parent/guardian signature in order to waive the 18+ requirement for agreeing to enlist. So although we wouldn’t actually be enlisted until we turned 18, we could agree to enlist beforehand with a parent’s signature. But, as strong as that memory is, I still can’t help but doubt myself because of how insane and illegal that all sounds.
Enlistment papers are thick. Unless they were handing out packets it was probably just a permission slip. Also, while I could see one of them being shitty enough to try and trap kids into the military this way, there’s no way the other 7 wouldn’t protest and get in their way. And not even on moral grounds. They’re all competing for recruits.