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 So, imagine you're a high school student (which you probably were not long ago) and you're contacted by a military recruiter (which you probably were at some point, especially if you were like me and scored really high on the ASFAB). You politely listen to his spiel or, if you were like me, you told him where he could put his rifle and promptly hung up.
Now, in this day and age, nobody's really surprised to get an unsolicited phone call from someone trying to get you to buy their bullshit, and until recently, that's how I would have seen this situation of a higschooler being harassed by a guy with a buzzcut who seems to have a problem with calling everyone "chief." Now, however, there's something more sinister going on.
Apparently, under the famed "No Child Left Behind" Act, any school that receives public funding must allow military recruiters on its premises. So ok, that's not so bad, right? Most schools are probably gonna do that anyway, because I doubt that most principals would have a huge problem with the good ol' United States Government recruiting soldiers out of their ranks of sweaty, hormonal, overly-charged boys and girls.
The thing that really gets me is that not only must the school allow the recruiters on its premises, it must also provide a list of all of its students and their contact information at the military's request. No, you didn't read that incorrectly - this "education" bill has a not-so-subtle rider. My girlfriend, a teacher, alerted me to this fact yesterday, and I figured she had to be wrong. Unfortunately, she wasn't.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." You ain't the only one, sister. Of course, students can choose not to be contacted, right? Kinda.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. And, of course, our good representatives are working hard to protect our children from this invasion of privacy: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." An anti-military attitude. Not a pro-privacy attitude or an anti-harassment attitude, but an anti-military attitude. Fuckin' liberal school systems.
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