Boston Globe:High Schoolers Rebuff Military Recruiters

The Boston Globe reports today that "More than 5,000 high school students in five of the state's largest school districts have removed their names from military recruitment lists, a trend driven by continuing casualties in Iraq and a well-organized peace movement that has urged students to avoid contact with recruiters.

The number of students removing their names has jumped significantly over the past year, especially in school systems with many low-income and minority students, where parents and activists are growing increasingly assertive in challenging military recruiters' access to young people."

Last week, San Francisco became the first US city to vote to urge high school and college campuses to keep out military recruiters. The San Francisco Chronicle writes, "The military recruitment initiative...won with 60 percent in favor and 40 percent against. Measure I, dubbed 'College Not Combat,' opposes the presence of military recruiters at public high schools and colleges. "

Buried in President Bush's much-touted No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 was Section 9528, a requirement that all public and private high schools receiving federal funds must "provide access to students' names, addresses and phone numbers" to military recruiters. It also mandates that high schools must allow military recruiters the same campus access to students as is granted to college recruiters and prospective employers.

High schools that don't comply with these requirement will lose federal funding, which would likely force closure of the school. The only exceptions to this law are private schools that can prove a "verifiable historical objection to military service."

Parents and students may opt out of allowing their students' data from being released to military recruiters by signing an optional form. However, many parents are unaware of the optional form, and many schools have not made the form readily available to parents. Also, there is no remedy if students' data is "accidentally" released to armed forces recruiters.

But that's not all. In Fall 2004, the US Army published a handbook that directs recruiters on how to build a an high school program to maximize enlistment among students....

Advice dispensed in the Army's School Recruiting Program Handbook includes :
-- "Cultivate coaches, librarians, administrative staff and teachers.
-- Be so helpful and so much a part of the school scene that you are in constant demand.
-- Know your student influencers. Students such as class officers, newspaper and yearbook editors, and athletes can help build interest in the Army among the student body.
-- Attend athletic events at the HS.
-- Coordinate with school officials to eat lunch in the school cafeteria several times each month.
-- Attend as many school holiday functions or assemblies as possible.

One mother recently registered her anger over aggressive recruiting tactics by the Air Force at her child's high school, "A cultural music event with a little injection of red, white, and blue is okay, but dammit, quit with the intensive recruiting stuff. This drives me nuts. I don’t send my kid to school so the military can relentlessly recruit a captive audience on school time. I strenuously protest!!"

'There's momentum you can see," said Felicity Crush, spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based Leave My Child Alone project told the Boston Globe. ''As soon as people become aware of it, they start to take action."

To enlist in the US armed forces, one must be a high school graduate, of reasonable intelligence and in good health. As recruiters fail to meet recruiting quotas, parents and students claim these rules have been bent. Complaint files are rife with stories of recruiter promises made and not kept, impossible commitments made to naive teenage recruits, and of frequent phone calls and surprise home visits by military personnel to potential recruits.

What can you do? How can you stop this? How can the military use the data collected on high school students? I answer these questions and more at Uncle Sam Guns for High School Students as Army Enlistees - Pentagon Develops Detailed Database of US Teenagers.
------------------------------
Related articles
-- Boston Globe article - Students Rebuffing Military Recruiters
-- Mother Protests Recruiters at High School
-- Iraq War Results and Statistics as of October 2005
-- Uncle Sam Guns for High School Students as Army Enlistees - Pentagon Develops Detailed Database of US Teenagers
------------------------------
Technorati Profile