Public schools required to provide student records
By Isaac Peterson III
For the NNPA
MINNEAPOLIS (NNPA) – At first glance, there does not appear to be any connection between these two headlines: “President signs No Child Left Behind into law” and a headline from last month, “Army, Marines miss recruiting goals again.”
But there is a connection.
A little-known provision of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation mandates that public schools receiving government funding must provide contact information of their students to military recruiters.
The provision in question is in Section 9528 of NCLB, called “Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information.”
Section 9528 stipulates, in part, that “each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students’ names, addresses, and telephone listings.”
Since the notification provision in NCLB threatens funding for public schools that do not comply, private schools are largely exempt from the requirement, meaning that it is the children of the less well-to-do who are primarily being targeted by recruiters.
Becky Bond, spokeswoman for the opposition group Working Assets, said, “Technically, that would include some private schools, but we’ve heard of no instance where this has been an issue, most likely because the military does not generally target private schools for recruits.”
Minnesota State Representative Mindy Greiling, who sits on the Education Finance and Education Policy and Reform Committees, said that the notification provision “de-emphasizes quality education” and has the effect of turning schools into “soldier mills.”
Since the notification requirement has received scant attention, so has another of its provisions: that parents and students can “opt out” of having the information supplied to recruiters.
The “opt out” clause sates: “A secondary school student or the parent of the student may request that the student’s name, address, and telephone listing described in paragraph (1) not be released without prior written parental consent, and the local educational agency or private school shall notify parents of the option to make a request and shall comply with any request.”
It is not known how many families have exercised this option.
However, there is growing opposition to the notification provision by schools around the country. Although both the Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools comply, schools in a number of cities like San Francisco, California; Madison, Wisconsin; and Montclair, New Jersey, are refusing.
And, opposition groups are springing up around the country. In addition to Working Assets, other organizations like United for Peace & Justice, Mainstreet Moms Operating Blue and Leave My Child Alone have made resistance to the military notification a major focus.
Leave My Child Alone works in conjunction with the other groups named, as well as others like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), and encourages community members to host gatherings at their homes to organize parents in opposition.
“When it comes to children under 18, serving in the military – especially during wartime – should be a family decision,” Becky Bond said. “This dangerous section in No Child Left Behind cuts parents out of the loop and leaves children vulnerable to military recruiters under extreme pressure to make their quotas.”
A formal military draft has not existed in the United States since 1973. With simultaneous military actions underway in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines, the all-volunteer military has been coming up short on recruits.
Although recruitment figures are falling, the demand for military personnel remains high, leading to great pressure on military recruiters. This pressure has led to many reports of aggressive and unscrupulous tactics by recruiters to sign up young people, including forging high school diplomas, pursuing mentally challenged high-schoolers and encouraging potential recruits to lie about drug use and arrests.
Part of the recruitment problem may perhaps be traced back to the Vietnam War. Those who resisted the draft in the ‘60s and ‘70s are now parents and grandparents, and they are standing between the military and their young.
On June 3, the New York Times reported that “Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.”
Military recruiters are currently under a gag rule, forbidding them to comment.
Leave My Child Alone can be contacted at www.leavemychildalone.org.