Military recruiter, data issue revisited
By Admin, Section From The Wires
Activists want students better told how to keep info from recruiters.
by Cory de Vera, News-Leader For the second year in a row, members of the Peace Network of the Ozarks on Tuesday asked the Springfield Board of Education to do a better job letting students know how they can keep their directory information out of the hands of military recruiters. Though many public schools have routinely turned over student addresses and phone numbers to military recruiters for years, a provision in the No Child Left Behind law specifically requires public high schools to do so. The law also gives students the right to withhold their information from recruiters. "I love our country, but I think it is shameful that our government uses public school records to troll our children," said resident Sharon Ash. As part of her plea, Ash held up pictures of young men who had been killed in Iraq, and read paragraphs from a recent news story about a number of recruiters across the country who have sexually harassed or assaulted high school students they were recruiting. In Springfield, families can restrict their child's information from distribution to recruiters by filling out a form in the back of the student handbook. Doing so, however, also restricts information from being distributed to other institutions that may ask, such a PTA that wishes to put together a directory or a summer camp that wishes to advertise its services. Gene Davison, chairman of the Peace Network, asked the board not to punish those who wished to opt out of military recruiting by withholding their information from other organizations, and also asked the district not to "bury" information about opting out in the student handbook.
Ash said that in Columbia, the district provided a separate opt-out form to students, and took out an ad in the local newspaper to further alert families of their right to opt out.
The Peace Network will be distributing that form, said Davison, if the district is unwilling. Board members asked no questions and made no comments in response to Ash and Davison's pleas. "We looked into it last year," board President Michael Hoeman told the News-Leader about the issue. "The net result was there really was no practical way to segregate providing information to the military from other persons or institutions requesting information," he said. The student handbook does not specify a date by which students must turn in an opt-out form to keep their information private. Organizations request directory information from the district year-round. Source
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