ZGram - 11/7/2002 - "No Child Unrecruited"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

November 7, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is not a pretty story!

[START]

No Child Unrecruited

Should the military be given the names of every high school student in America?

David Goodman
November/December 2002

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 19,228 schools. 
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.

[END]

(Source: 
http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2002/45/ma_153_01.html 
)