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A government report released Friday on sexual abuse in high school Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) programs estimates that dozens and potentially hundreds of instructors have been accused of sexually abusing or harassing students in the past five years, the New York Times reported Friday.
JROTC programs operate in more than 3,400 public schools, where veterans teach teenagers topics such as military history, life skills, and marksmanship to roughly half a million students each year. The instructors have long worked with little oversight and limited training on being a teacher.
A series of New York Times articles in 2022 found that 33 instructors had been criminally charged with sexual misconduct involving students over a five year period and that many students were being automatically enrolled into what is supposed to be an elective course.
Those articles spurred several government inquiries and led to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued on Friday, which for the first time provides an official estimate of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in the program. Over the past five years, between 2 and 7 percent of schools with JROTC programs had at least one instructor accused of sexual misconduct, a broad category that ranges from sending sexual messages to assault. That could mean as many as 240 schools.
The concerns come as the Trump administration and its supporters have laid out plans for expanding JROTC programs to build a better pipeline for military recruiting. Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint written by a think tank, called for increasing the number of JROTC programs in high schools.
Before he was confirmed as secretary of the Army earlier this year, Daniel Driscoll told senators at a hearing that expanding JROTC could help with recent military recruiting challenges. He vowed to work on promoting the program “because these are the kind of lineages and relationships and chains that we can build into communities that can get us not just one future soldier but get us generations of soldiers.”
In 2022, military leaders acknowledged under pressure from Congress that they had inadequately supervised the program and said they would welcome more scrutiny. In total, the Defense Department spent about $439 million on JROTC in the 2024 fiscal year, which ran through September 2024.
The report released on Friday found that about one in ten schools with JROTC programs did not have required staff training on sexual misconduct.
To produce the report, the GAO sent surveys to a random sample of 659 schools and received results from 441. The report is the first of two on sexual abuse in JROTC, and it was completed following a 2022 request from Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who at the time led the congressional Committee on Education and Labor.
About 60 percent of schools had no mandatory training for students on how they could report sexual misconduct, the report found. Approximately 54 percent of school administrators said they believed that better training for recognizing inappropriate adult behavior could help protect their students.
About half of the schools require that there be at least two adults present for any activities that take place outside of regular school hours, which many JROTC programs routinely hold.
f you or your child experienced sexual misconduct or abuse in a school program, confidential help is available. Learn your legal rights with our Institutional Sexual Abuse Lawsuit Guide.
