Schools must provide greater access to military recruiters

11/5/02 – Most high schools have traditionally permitted military recruiters on campus, but now they also must give recruiters access to students' names, addresses, and phone numbers.

Both the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2002 require all school districts that receive federal assistance to give military recruiters the same access to secondary school students as they provide to colleges, universities, and prospective employers.

NCLB also requires school districts to provide lists of students' names, addresses, and telephone numbers to recruiters, when requested, unless the students' parents tell the school that they don't want this information given out.

These new requirements took effect in July.

Schools that fail to comply with these requirements could lose federal education funding.

In addition, the defense authorization law requires a senior military officer to visit a district within 120 days if there is a problem with access. After one year, the Department of Defense must notify Congress if a district refuses access to at least two branches of the armed forces.

According to a document issued by the Education Department, the Defense Department's national high school database shows that 95 percent of the nation's secondary schools provide a degree of access to military recruiters that is consistent with current law.

"There had always been relatively few schools that denied access to the campus. The primary area of concern was the release of directory information [name, address, and phone number]," says Maj. Sandy Troeber in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

She says only 1 percent of schools denied directory information to two or more branches of the armed services, compared to a third of the nation's schools in the summer of 2001, and about 15 percent this summer.

"Resistance is down as more schools learn that they may indeed release the information to military recruiters and still be in compliance with student privacy statutes–a point of confusion that had contributed to many if not most of the previous denials," Troeber says.

Civil liberties advocates have complained that these new requirements are an invasion of students' privacy.

"In accommodating the military recruiting mandate, the Department of Education is bending over backward to assist the military at the expense of student privacy rights," says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

According to Lieberman, the New York City education department has "utterly ignored" the requirement that schools must obtain written permission from parents to disclose information to recruiters.

She complains that New York City Chancellor Joel Klein mailed letters to parents of high school students in late September giving them a deadline of Oct. 15 to notify schools if they wanted their child's contact information to be kept confidential.

"Who knows whether this letter gets received or read," Lieberman says. "Opt-out features typically receive little or no attention or response, which means information will be released by default, rather than intention."

She has urged the state and the city to instead implement an "opt in" procedure, so the student information won't be released unless parents give permission.

And she says, that by law, students 18 and older, should also have the right to decide whether this information is given to the military.

Bill Cala, superintendent of the Fairport, N.Y., school system, agrees that the requirement to give out directory information to military recruiters is an invasion of privacy.

It's "completely wrong-headed to have a laissez-faire opt-out policy," Cala says. "You can always add someone's information, but once it's out there, you can't take it back."

The district sent a letter to parents of juniors and seniors at Fairport High School asking them to check one of two boxes–one giving the district permission to give out names, addresses, and phone numbers, and one denying permission. If a parent doesn't respond, the district won't give out the information, Cala says.

The results haven't been officially tallied yet, but he says only a "miniscule" number of parents want information about their children given to the military. The district, in a suburb of Rochester, does not typically see a large number of high school graduates enlist in the military, he says.

Troeber says the legislation is necessary because the armed services experienced "a couple of years of very tight recruiting in the late 1990s." And, she says, "while there was an increase in interest in the military following 9/11, that did not carry over into increased enlistments."

She says having lists of names, addresses, and phone numbers of prospective recruits will make recruiting "less onerous" and thus more cost-effective.

Cala says he wasn't even aware that the massive No Child Left Behind Act contained a provision on military recruiting "until military recruiters came knocking on the door asking for lists."

He says Fairport High has always allowed recruiters to come to the school on the same basis as college recruiters.

Thea Magee Block, a school board member at the Spring-Ford Area School District in Collegeville, Pa., says she has no problem with high schools letting recruiters speak to students "as long as they tell the truth."

Block says recruiters who have spoken at high school assemblies in her district "make enlistment sound very glamorous." They have promised that students who enlist will learn job skills, travel the world, receive a fully paid, four-year college education and can leave at any time during the first 180 days, which she says, is not necessarily true.

The issue takes on greater importance now that the nation is on the brink of a war with Iraq, Lieberman notes. "People's concerns about being in a military database are magnified."

Lieberman also questions the military's motives in collecting data on immigrant students and putting them into a military database, noting that databases always have uses beyond their original intent.