Legislation requires that high schools surrender students' home addresses and phone numbers to military recruiters–but you don't have to participate!

Buried deep within President Bush's sweeping new education law No Child Left Behind is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student—or face a cutoff of all federal aid.

The military has complained that up to 15 percent of the nation's high schools are "problem schools" for recruiters. In 1999, the Pentagon says, recruiters were denied access to 19,228 schools. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana who sponsored the new recruitment requirement, says such schools "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."

The new law does give students the right to withhold their records. But school officials are given wide leeway in how to implement the law, and some are simply handing over student directories to recruiters without informing anyone—leaving students without any say in the matter.

Educators point out that the armed services have exceeded their recruitment goals for the past two years in a row, even without access to every school.

Recruiters are up-front about their plans to use school lists to aggressively pursue students through mailings, phone calls, and personal visits—even if parents object. "The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman," says Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York. "Or maybe if the kid died, we'll take them off our list."

What you can do
*To keep a student's name off the recruiters' lists, contact high school officials. The student or the parent can do this. It will be helpful to do this early in the student's high school career, perhaps by the sophomore year, in order to make sure that the name is not passed on to recruiters.

*Contact your local high school or school district office to request that a notice be placed in school newsletters each year to remind parents and students of this regulation and of the option for students' contact information to be denied recruiters.

*Suggest that your school district send an annual notification to parents or guardians of the children in their district, advising them of the intent of the law and the process for having a child exempted. A sample notification is provided.