A government report released Friday on sexual abuse in high school Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs estimated that dozens, and potentially hundreds, of instructors have been accused of sexually abusing or harassing students in the past five years.
J.R.O.T.C. programs operate in more than 3,400 public schools, where veterans teach teenagers about topics such as military history, life skills and marksmanship to half a million students each year. But the instructors long operated 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.
The articles spurred several government inquiries and led to the report issued on Friday by the Government Accountability Office, which for the first time provided an official estimate of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in the program. In the past five years, the report found, between 2 and 7 percent of schools with J.R.O.T.C. programs had at least one instructor accused of sexual misconduct, which includes a broad range of behavior, 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 J.R.O.T.C. 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 J.R.O.T.C. 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 J.R.O.T.C. 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 J.R.O.T.C. in the 2024 fiscal year, which ran through September 2024.
The report released on Friday found that about one in 10 schools with J.R.O.T.C. programs did not have required staff training on sexual misconduct.
To produce the report, the Government Accountability Office 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 J.R.O.T.C., 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 J.R.O.T.C. programs routinely hold.