By Kathleen Acuff

Parents and peace activists concerned about military recruitment of high school students recently pointed to two difficulties with the Denial of Consent form that students took home at the beginning of the school year for their parents to read and sign - or not. The signed “opt out” form prevents the armed forces from trying to recruit students on or off campus.

One problem is that the form can be overlooked in the stack students took home. The other problem is that it may not be the only form parents need to sign to prevent recruiter contact.

Barbara O’Reilly of Los Altos Voices for Peace said the matter is “a dual issue concerning family privacy and military recruitment at the high school level.”

Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts receiving federal money to provide names, addresses and phone numbers of juniors and seniors to military recruiters unless a parent has chosen not to release that information by signing the opt-out form.

O’Reilly said, “Unknown to most students and parents is the fact that the Pentagon is now collecting information in a new database known as the Joint Advertising and Market Research Recruiting Service (see www.jamrs.org). … So opting out at the district level is somewhat meaningless unless students and families also send a second separate request to the government.”

The necessary form is available at www.leavemychildalone.org.

This year, 519 students returned signed opt-out forms to the school office: three of Alta Vista High’s 143 students, 165 of Los Altos High’s 1,709 students and 351 of Mountain View High’s 1,760 students. Eighty-three of the Los Altos High students opting out were juniors and seniors; 200 Mountain View juniors and seniors opted out.

Norma Puder of the Educational Services Department of the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District, explained the schools’ opt-out process:

Parents had until Sept. 30 to sign the form and return it to the principal’s office, which forwarded all returned forms to the registrar’s office. The registrar coded the student in the database, placed the opt-out form in the student’s cumulative file and informed the Educational Services Department. A program technician generated a report omitting the names of those juniors and seniors who opted out and gave recruiters a copy on disk.

The district provides the information to the military only once a year. Students whose parents miss the deadline will be contacted by recruiters this year, but their names will not be on the list next year. When recruiters call, parents can tell them not to call again, Puder said.

Kristin Joseph, coordinator of Los Altos High’s College and Career Center, said school officials treat military recruiters the same way they treat recruiters from post-secondary schools. Recruiters are allowed to meet with students only once a semester and at a time scheduled through the career center. Recruiters from each arm of the military can meet with students for one class period in the career center and set up recruitment tables in the quad. They are not permitted to leave the table to solicit students.

Joseph said, “The armed forces are aware that our school doesn’t send a lot of kids to the military, so they don’t come around much. We haven’t had any incidents of uninvited recruiters approaching students on campus in the past six years.”