Eight high school students and a 19-year-old Americorps “volunteer” were recently arrested for their role in an Earth First! logging protest in Humboldt County during what they had told school officials would be a field trip to look at alternative agriculture methods.
The students are enrolled in an alternative education program, San Francisco Unified School District’s Urban Pioneer Program, and Americorps worker David Wehrer had arranged a field trip to take the students to a Humboldt Country ranch where they were supposed to learn about organic farming. Instead Wehrer apparently decided to take the children to the anti-logging protest where he managed to evade arrest but his young charges were scooped up along with adult Earth First! protesters.
Wehrer has been charged with 16 criminal charges, including 8 counts of felony child endangerment and 8 counts of misdemeanor contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Environmentalists are protesting logging by Pacific Lumber Col. in an ongoing controversy over old growth Douglas firs. Prosecutors argue that taking children to the protest constitutes criminal child endangerment, noting that a protester was killed by a falling tree in 1998 at the same site.
“To use kids as cannon fodder for a cause is an example of completely misplaced values,” Humboldt County District Attorney Terry Farmer said.
The San Francisco Chronicle didn’t mention it, but if Wherer was acting in an official capacity as an Americorps volunteer — which he seems to have been doing — he was violating federal law in engaging in political advocacy (this is an ongoing problem with the Americorps program).
Source:
8 students skip school, get busted at protest; 19-year-old volunteer faces felony charges. Mark Martin, San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2001.