California schools are urging parents to opt out of a system which notifies the military of the names and phone numbers of high school juniors and seniors eligible for service.
An amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act requires public high schools to give military recruiters the names and phone numbers of juniors and seniors — unless their parents say no. If school officials don’t provide the information, they risk losing millions of federal dollars.But the San Francisco and Los Angeles school districts are engaged in an active campaign to let parents know they have the right to decline.
"We are complying with the law, but we are also making clear to our parents that … they have the opportunity to opt out of it, to choose not to have private information provided to the military," said Jill Wynns, a San Francisco Board of Education commissioner.
As a conservative and a veteran of the all volunteer Navy, I suppose I should be outraged.
But I'm not.
The decision whether or not to make that information available to local recruiters should be up to the parents first, then the child.
Not the school, and not some legislature.
In fact, I have more trouble with the law itself than with the school system spending money to fully inform parents about the law, and their rights under it.
Posted by Rich at March 12, 2003 11:06 AM | TrackBackI agree. It's no different than if schools notified car companies when kids turn 16 (or whatever the age is to get a license these days) or notifying tobacco companies when they turn 18. Armed services recruiting, from what little I know about it from a brief encounter with the draft board in 1972, is all about marketing for the most part.
Posted by: SK Bubba on March 12, 2003 3:31 PM