No Child's Privacy Left Uninvaded

Buried deep in the 670 pages of the new No Child Left Behind Act is a sensible provision that military recruiters must be given access to school campuses - something that liberal anti-military school administrators at 19,228 schools had denied them.

But accompanying that provision was another not at all sensible requirement....

School officials in San Francisco and Portland, Ore., for example, have barred recruiters from schools because they complain that the military allegedly discriminates against gays and lesbians.

But accompanying that provision was another not at all sensible requirement that recruiters be given not only access to school facilities, but also student's personal information. Failure to comply would result in a cutoff of all federal aid.

Sharon Shea-Keneally, principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, told Mother Jones magazine she 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.

Her school she said, already 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," Shea-Keneally told Mother Jones, "not to colleges, churches, employers - nobody." Congress approved the new provision after the armed forces complained that this year as many as 15 percent of the nation's high schools are "problem schools" for recruiters.

According to Mother Jones, the Pentagon says that in 1999, recruiters were denied access to 19,228 schools. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, told Mother Jones that such schools "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."

But school officials find the personal information requirement equally offensive.

"We feel it is a clear departure from the letter and the spirit of the current student privacy laws," Bruce Hunter, chief lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators told Mother Jones. "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."

While the new law allows students to withhold their records, because school officials are allowed to implement the law as they see fit, they sometimes simply hand over student information without even telling the students, thus depriving them of any say in the matter.

"I think the privacy implications of this law are profound," Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education told Mother Jones. "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."

Recruiters make no bones about their plans to use school lists to try to recruit 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," Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York told Mother Jones' David Goodman. "Or maybe if the kid died, we'll take them off our list."

I have no problem with Military recruiters using school lists to recruit teenagers, but parents should be able to sign some kind of objection form.

I have no problem with that. I have problems with public schools receive federal tax dollars keeping recruiters off campus. Leftsist just love it when they use federal money to shove their agendas down our throats. I think its about time we made leftists less enamored of centralizing power in the federal government.

If you do not register with selective service you are ineligible for student loans/grants. When you register you can also register as a conciencious objector if you walk on the left side.

Public schools are in need of a major scraping.

I think there should be a federal ban on prohibiting military recruiting on campus. These so called educucators have no right to limit the options of their students. I knew of a law professor who allowed his personal office to be used to recruit for the Jag. (he had tenure) It was a classic.

Is it just grades that are protected or ALL information?

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