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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
To get federal money, schools have to give students' names and numbers to military recruiters. But some schools, claiming invasion of privacy, are fighting back.
Mar 21, 2005 | One day in the next two weeks, a uniformed colonel from the U.S. Army is expected to pay a visit to William Cala, the superintendent of the Fairport Central School District in Fairport, N.Y., east of Rochester. While Cala has not been told exactly what's on the agenda, he knows why the colonel is coming: to try to talk some sense into him about how he's handled the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act. It might seem strange that the Pentagon is sending an emissary to a school district, but it's actually the law.
The colonel's visit is the latest move in a three-year dispute between the Fairport school district and the government over a little-known provision of No Child Left Behind, the controversial landmark education legislation passed in 2001. The provision, under Section 9528 of the law, requires districts that receive federal funding to share students' names, addresses and phone numbers with military recruiters. This is where Cala, an outspoken critic of NCLB, has run into problems with the law -- he doesn't want to hand over student data to military recruiters without explicit permission from parents. "The Fairport Board of Education has a very long-standing policy that we don't share student information with anybody, period," says Cala, who has run the Fairport schools for eight years. "We're being forced to reverse this policy because the military says so, and we don't think that's fair or right."
The government is hoping the colonel will help Cala change his mind. Schools that don't comply with the law are at risk of losing their federal funding, and a visit from a military officer is the government's first step toward rectifying the situation. Cala's is currently the only school district in the country known to be declared in violation of Section 9528 -- but this issue has been causing problems for schools across the nation. In places like Santa Cruz, Calif., and San Francisco, educators have struggled to balance their desire to protect student privacy against the threat of losing federal education funding.
The Pentagon claims the law is intended simply to ensure that students get the chance to learn about joining the military, but critics believe that allowing recruiters access to student information is a privacy violation and a desperate attempt to encourage military recruiting at a time when the Defense Department is failing to meet recruiting goals. Some parents, and civil liberties advocates, have complained that recruiters have gone so far as to show up at students' homes after school, uninvited. "This is not some innocuous advertising circular that you're getting," says Donna Lieberman, the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is assisting Fairport in its battle with the government. "These are hard-hitting, hardball marketing tactics that are reasonably intended to intimidate people either to listen or to sign up."
Superintendent Cala is not opposed to sharing student information with the Pentagon per se. In fact, over the past three years, he has delivered them the names of nearly 200 students, and in 2002, the Army sent a note thanking him for his cooperation. But he is opposed to distributing students' information without parental consent, and that's where he and the government are at odds. The law requires that parents who wish to keep their child's information private must opt out of the policy, or, in other words, specifically state in writing that they do not grant consent. If a parent does not respond to school notification of the measure, either because the notification was never received or because it was thrown away with the junk mail, the government requires the school to consider that permission to hand over the student's name and phone number to the Department of Defense. According to Army spokesman Douglas Smith, many schools were providing this information to the military even before NCLB was enacted, and the requirement is intended to get data from schools that were not already sharing it. "Most schools think it's in their students' interests to learn about what the military offers," Smith said.
The Fairport school district has taken a different approach to how information is collected. "In the letter we send home, we say we have to have the form back or we won't process it," Cala explains. "We feel to protect the privacy rights of our students, their information isn't released without their explicit permission. We've read the No Child Left Behind law and our attorneys have read it, and we believe we're compliant." What's more, Cala feels that an opt-in policy, rather than opt-out, ultimately helps the military because the students whose names go to recruiters actually want to be contacted. "When we give them a list, it's a smaller list because few parents want the information released," he says. "But they don't have to sift through the garbage. Why does this disturb the military? We're doing their recruiting for them."
