Military given names of every
high school student in America
Mother Jones
No Child Unrecruited
By David Goodman
November/December 2002 Issue
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.
"I was very surprised the requirement was attached to an
education law," says Shea-Keneally. "I did not see the link."
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.
"I think the privacy implications of this law are profound,"
says Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of
Education. "For the federal government to ignore or discount the
concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school
students is not a good thing, and it's something we should be
concerned about."
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." .
|