Call to Join the Kentucky Youth Advisory Council for the USPSA

Attention all college and high school students interested in grassroots campaigning and public service:

My name is Sean Feeney and I'm the Kentucky State Representative for the National Youth Advisory Council of the United States Public Service Academy (USPSA). Each state is creating their own local advisory councils to coordinate campaigning inside of their state, and it's time for Kentucky to create one!

As a member of the Kentucky Youth Advisory Council you will help get the word out about the Academy to your friends and colleagues and help arrange meetings with influential people in your area! You'll circulate the petition and blog about all things USPSA.

For more information please visit the USPSA website at www.uspublicserviceacademy.org.

If you are interested in joining, please contact me by commenting on this or sending me a message.

If you are from another state and would like to help in your own state, you can also contact me and I'll arrange that for you!

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The U.S. Public Service Academy is an exciting effort that is capturing the imagination of young people all across the country. You can become an important part of our movement by joining your state’s Youth Advisory Council (YAC). As part of the YAC, you will help us build the Academy in three important ways:

1) Youth mobilization
We need to spread the word about the Academy to young people everywhere – in schools, churches, synagogues, malls, FaceBook, MySpace, . . . The best way to get young people involved is to have another young person tell them about what we are doing. YAC members will help us get more young folks involved in the movement.

2) Political action
Think you are too young to make an impact on politics? Wrong! Young people have already been tremendously helpful in getting a bill to create the Academy in front of Congress. The U.S. Public Service Academy Act (S. 960 in the Senate and H.R. 1671 in the House of Representatives) was introduced in March 2007. Now that the bill has been introduced, we need to convince people in Congress to support it. YAC members can help us organize letter-writing campaigns and call-in days that will encourage representatives and senators to join us.

3) Blueprint feedback
As part of the movement to build the Academy, we are writing a Blueprint that will describe what the school will look like from the ground up. This document will cover admissions, faculty, students, student life, post-graduation placement, and other important topics. YAC members will read through the document to make sure that we don’t screw it up – after all, young people will attend the college, and we want to be sure that our plans make sense to them.

As part of the Kentucky YAC, you will help us change the face of higher education in this country. You will be expected to spend 1-2 hours a week (more if there is a major event coming up) working on the Academy. The hours are flexible, and much of the work can be done online.

US Public Service Academy Act

It is very important for the future of our country that this bill pass. It would cost a mere fraction of the cost of the Iraq War and would produce leaders capable of not getting us into a future Iraq War. You know, those intelligent type, the ones who aren't getting through school on daddy's paycheck. It would be like the USAF Academy without the whole marching to lunch together thing...without the uniforms, but with all of the leadership training. Not to mention that it would give free college education to thousands of US students who otherwise could not afford a good, quality higher education.

Europeans have had this figured out for decades. We're one of the few Western countries who don't already have a civil service academy - and today's corruption in Washington is reflective of this.

It's a project without big-time lobbyists and with very little money. But advocates for a federally financed public-service academy have managed to put together a bill and line up congressional sponsors, and now hope to find committee chairmen to sponsor Capitol Hill hearings.

"A year ago, this was a piece of paper and a Web site," said Chris Myers Asch, who is a leader of the effort. "It has gotten a lot further and a lot faster than we anticipated. Folks from across the political spectrum have endorsed the idea."

Yesterday, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Reps. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) re-introduced legislation to create a U.S. Public Service Academy. A version introduced last September was too late for any congressional action, but Clinton and Shays promised to try to get the votes for passage this year.

The school would offer a free education to about 5,000 undergraduates in exchange for their commitment to work for five years in public-service jobs in local, state and federal governments.

The nation has supported "wonderful military academies," Clinton said, but "we don't have a comparable institution to prepare leaders on the civilian side."

Added Specter, "We need more professionalism in government."

Asch and Shawn Raymond, who served in AmeriCorps together in Mississippi, came up with the idea for the academy after seeing friends shy away from government careers because of school debts or because they could not see themselves working in a large bureaucracy.

"We are not getting people to come into public service," Moran said, in part because the cost of higher education steers young people to more lucrative jobs in the private sector.

Moran said the academy is urgently needed because it would help fill staffing gaps in agencies created over the next decade as more federal employees retire.

The bill sponsoring the academy does not say where it should be located, but proponents think Washington makes sense because the federal government serves as a magnet for public-policy scholars and is home to think tanks, nonprofit groups and federal agencies with specialists who could teach.

The proposed academy would use West Point and other military academies as models and would be administered by the Department of Homeland Security. A major goal of the academy would be to train leaders in education, health care and law enforcement to bolster national security, Asch said.

"Without strong and effective public institutions, we aren't safe and secure," Asch added. "I think Hurricane Katrina proved that dramatically."

Asch said he has left his job at a nonprofit group he founded with Raymond and is working full time on the academy project. He presented Clinton with a letter yesterday signed by more than 1,000 young people who heard about the academy through social networks online.

Young people today "want more out of themselves. They want a chance to serve," Asch said, adding, "This is an idea whose time has come."

Although eight senators and 20 House members have agreed to co-sponsor the bill, its prospects are uncertain. The price tag would run about $200 million annually, not counting start-up costs, and that might be too much money for Congress to guarantee when it is under pressure to hold down federal spending in fiscal 2008 and pay for Iraq war costs.

Source: The Washington Post