Soapbox

No Child Left Unrecruited

Is your or your child’s personal information being released to the recruiting office of the US military without your knowledge or consent?

Under a newly activated provision of the No Child Left Behind Act, high schools across the nation must provide the Defense Department a directory with the name, address and telephone of all juniors and seniors or risk losing federal funding.

Sharon Shea-Keneally, principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, was shocked when she received a letter in May from military recruiters demanding a list of all her students, including names, addresses, and phone numbers. The school invites recruiters to participate in career days and job fairs, but like most school districts, it keeps student information strictly confidential. “We don’t give out a list of names of our kids to anybody,” says Shea-Keneally, “not to colleges, churches, employers — nobody.”

But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush’s sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law’s 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student — or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

The military complained this year that up to 15 percent of the nation’s high schools are “problem schools” for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to schools on 19,228 occasions. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools “demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive.”

To many educators, however, requiring the release of personal information intrudes on the rights of students. “We feel it is a clear departure from the letter and the spirit of the current student privacy laws,” says Bruce Hunter, chief lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators. Until now, schools could share student information only with other educational institutions. “Now other people will want our lists,” says Hunter. “It’s a slippery slope. I don’t want student directories sent to Verizon either, just because they claim that all kids need a cell phone to be safe.”

The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone — leaving students without any say in the matter.

Educators point out that the armed services have exceeded their recruitment goals for the past two years in a row, even without access to every school. The new law, they say, undercuts the authority of some local school districts, including San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, that have barred recruiters from schools on the grounds that the military discriminates against gays and lesbians. Officials in both cities now say they will grant recruiters access to their schools and to student information — but they also plan to inform students of their right to withhold their records.

Some students are already choosing that option. According to Principal Shea-Keneally, 200 students at her school — one-sixth of the student body — have asked that their records be withheld.

Recruiters are up-front about their plans to use school lists to aggressively pursue students through mailings, phone calls, and personal visits — even if parents object. “The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman,” says Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York. “Or maybe if the kid died, we’ll take them off our list.”

To me, being against this isn’t about being anti-military. Although I think my kid would make a lousy soldier, I thank God for the people who do join the military, and all they do for the country. To me, it is a right of privacy issue. Schools have no more business giving names and numbers to the military than they would to a religious group or a phone solicitor. If the military wants to recruit our teenagers, they know where to find them.

More information on who and how to request your child’s name be left off the list is available at Wagingpeace.org. Go to

http://www.wagingpeace.org/menu/action/ongoing-actions/no-child/