Page One

The Alameda County Board of Education is asking its 18 school districts to take a more aggressive stand concerning military recruiters, encouraging them to adopt a controversial “opt in” policy to inform students, parents and legal guardians “of their rights to withhold their child’s name and contact information to the military recruiters.” 

The “opt in” policy is so controversial that even the anti-war organizer who brought the military recruitment issue to the board believes that the policy is against federal law. The resolution was passed unanimously at Tuesday’s board meeting. 

Under President George Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, federal funds can be withheld from any school district unless they provide military recruiters with access to the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all secondary school students. 

The act provides a “consent” provision that parents or students can request that students’ personal information not be released to recruiters “without prior written parental consent,” and several local school districts—including Albany Unified and Fremont Unified—have interpreted this to mean that the districts must provide military recruiters with student information unless parents sign a form specifically requesting the district not do so. Some call this the “opt out” policy, because it gives parents the option to have their children kept out of the information network. 

However, other local districts, including Berkeley Unified, have adopted a more liberal interpretation of the “consent” provision, stating that they will presume that parents do not wish to have their children’s personal information released to military recruiters unless the parents fill out a form consenting to that release. Observers call this the “opt in” policy. 

In Tuesday’s resolution, county school board members noted that NCLB “requires school districts to inform your students and their parents of their ‘opt-out’ rights.” But the resolution went on to state that “students, parents and legal guardians should be informed that if a notice is not provided the high school will assume that they do not authorize the school to release the requested information and their child’s name and contact information will not be released.” 

In a 2003 letter to the Santa Cruz City High School District Board of Education, when that district was considering adopting the “opt-in” policy, American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California staff attorney Ann Brick wrote that the federal act is not clear on how schools must notify parents or the procedure the school must use to determine parents’ wishes concerning the release of student directory information. 

“The assumption that parents do not object to the release of this information simply because they have not expressed their wishes is very problematic,” he wrote, “particularly when the information is provided as part of a much larger packet of information sent to parents at the beginning of the school year. All too often parents will only learn after-the-fact that information they wished to be kept private has been released to the military when an unsolicited recruitment telephone call or letter is received.” 

According to a statement by Josh Sonnenfield with the Santa Cruz-based Resource Center for Nonviolence, one of the groups that lobbied for the Santa Cruz opt-in provision, “in the summer of 2003, the Federal Government sent out a letter to every State Secretary of Education noting their opposition to opt-in and their belief that opt-in was not legal. That led to a crackdown on districts with opt-in in California. However opt-in still exists in a few places on the East Coast.” 

Barbara Heringer-Swar, a military resistance organizer who brought the issue to the Alameda County Board of Education, said following the board vote she believed the “opt-in” provision was “against the law.” 

Heringer-Swar, who has a son at Hayward High School and is employed by the Central Committee For Conscientious Objectors in Oakland, said her concern was that county schools were not even informing parents that they could “opt out” of the information program. 

“I thought this was a no-brainer,” she told board members. “Parents ought to be able to choose who contacts their children. If we ask parents to give consent for their children’s’ pictures to go in a newspaper, we should be asking them to give consent about going to war.” 

Under Berkeley Unified’s military recruiter information provision, passed in 2003, parents of high school students are provided with a form in the Student/Parent Handbook asking the parents to check a box and sign their names stating: “Please DO release my student’s name, and address, and/or telephone number.” The form goes on to inform parents that if they “do not check a box and sign above, [the high school] will NOT release your child’s information to military recruiters.” 

BUSD Public Information Officer Mark Coplan said that under Berkeley Unified’s program, only 27 parents had chosen to opt in to the military information program. 

“Because we expected the numbers of ‘opt-in’ students to be so low in Berkeley, this partly a measure to minimize paperwork,” Coplan said. “We knew there would be far more forms to be filled out and handled by the district if we had asked parents to opt out.” 

Coplan added that he thought Berkeley’s system was “a better use of time for the military recruiters themselves. It means they don’t have to waste their time with students who don’t want to be contacted.” 

Fremont Unified School District Communications Director Gary Leatherman said that in the spring of 2003 the district began sending out letters to the parents of juniors and seniors in the district’s five high schools and one continuation school “informing them that unless the district has a request on file that the parent does not want such information released, when recruiters ask for their children’s names, addresses, and telephone numbers, it will be released.” 

Leatherman said that an “opt out” form is now included in the district’s Parents Rights Handbook. Leatherman said that of the district’s 4,320 junior and senior students, 730 have requested to opt out of the military recruitment information program. He called that number “fairly significant.” 

Leatherman said that Fremont Unified is also considering adding a provision to the form that allows parents to excuse their children from any presentations by military recruiters on campus. 

?