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Students Join in Protest as GOP Convention Opens

New York

The first time Naomi Gordon-Loebl can remember taking to the streets, she wound up taking to the nearest tree. Accompanying her parents to a rally protesting the first Persian Gulf war 13 years ago, Naomi, then four years old, scooted up a suitable trunk in Washington's Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House.

Now 17 years old, Ms. Gordon-Loebl, a Manhattan public school student, is a more seasoned activist, but no less strong-willed. On Aug. 29, the day before the Republican National Convention opened, the high school senior-to-be joined tens of thousands of protesters in a march that took them through the heart of Manhattan past Madison Square Garden, the site of the GOP gathering. Crowd estimates from protest organizers and media outlets ranged from 100,000 to 500,000, but city officials declined to release an official number.

Many of the student-protestors vented anger over a provision in the No Child Left Behind Act, the sweeping federal education initiative Mr. Bush signed into law in 2002, that requires schools to give military recruiters greater access to students' personal information and makes it more difficult for districts to bar the recruiters from high school campuses. Those policies, at a time when the United States is immersed in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, seemed to galvanize...