Veterans Group Fights Policy That Gives Student Data to Recruiters

More than 30 years ago, Michael Cervantes was drafted fresh out of Oxnard High School, trained for combat and shipped off to the jungles of Vietnam where he fought for his country and the freedoms it represents.

As he sees it, he is fighting for those freedoms still.

For the last three months, the 55-year-old Army veteran has campaigned on behalf of student privacy, challenging a Bush administration policy that requires high schools to disclose student records to military recruiters or risk losing federal aid.

Working under the banner of Veterans for Peace, Cervantes and others recently succeeded in pushing Santa Barbara and Oxnard school officials to better inform parents about how to shield the student information from military review.

“All we want is for parents to be notified that they have this option,” said Cervantes, who heads the Ventura County chapter of the antiwar group. “I don’t think schools should be used to recruit in this manner.”

School districts across California have wrestled with a desire to protect student privacy while complying with a mandate authorized by the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, the education law passed in 2001.

Under that mandate, recruiters are entitled to get the names, addresses and phone numbers of high school juniors and seniors, unless parents or students sign a form requesting that the data be withheld. Districts that don’t comply stand to lose millions in federal funding. So far, no school district has had funding withheld for failing to comply with the law, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell said the recruiting tool has provided a more efficient and cost-effective method of finding those interested in military service.

At the same time, it has allowed the military to deliver its recruiting message to a wider audience as it seeks to maintain the country’s all-volunteer fighting force, she said.

“This allows the Department of Defense to recruit from a much broader, diverse and more representative group of the youth of America,” Campbell said. “But if a parent does not want [the information] to be provided to any organization, the Department of Defense being one, they can simply opt out.”

The policy went into effect at the start of the 2002-03 school year and school districts have since been scrambling to spread the word. Some include the information in handbooks mailed at the start of the school year, accompanied by forms families can use to block the data from release.

Others, including the behemoth Los Angeles Unified School District and the tiny Ojai school system in Ventura County, mail individual letters notifying students and parents of their rights to withhold the data and provide the forms to do so. School officials said those efforts are not meant to discourage military participation but to protect student privacy.

“I think parents have a right to know any time the names, addresses and phone numbers of their children are being given to anyone,” said Bob Unruhe, an Ojai school district trustee and World War II veteran. About 300 of Ojai’s 1,300 high school students have requested that the information be withheld.

“If some of our students want military careers, certainly that’s their privilege and we want to make sure they get that information,” Unruhe said. “But students need to be fully aware of everything that is involved in military service, especially with military ventures such as the one we have going on in Iraq.”

Other California school districts have tried more radical approaches.

San Francisco officials sent opt-out forms to all high school students last year after adoption of a resolution that began, “Whereas: Soul music legend Curtis Mayfield said: ‘We got to have peace/To keep the world alive and war to cease.’ ”

Administrators also told students and parents that if they did not return the forms, the district would assume they didn’t want to share the data and would refuse to release it.

That prompted a letter from the state superintendent for public instruction stating that a specific request to withhold the data must be made for access to be denied. The district has since modified its policy, requiring parents to return the form in order to opt out.

School officials in Thousand Oaks in Ventura County ran into the same trouble after deciding to adhere to a long-standing policy of withholding student information unless a parent expressly requests its release. That position generated complaints from the military and a letter from the state, said Richard Simpson, an assistant superintendent in the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Ordered to change its policy, the district sent letters in October to every high school junior and senior informing them that unless they signed opt-out forms, the district would be required to release their personal information.

“Our fax machine was humming,” said Simpson, noting that about half of the district’s 3,200 juniors and seniors opted to withhold the information.

“Our community just doesn’t like this; it likes to keep this information private and we’ve always respected that,” he added. “This has nothing to do with the value of military service, it’s about who should or should not have access to personal information about minors.”

Last summer, at a Veterans for Peace meeting in Santa Barbara, Michael Cervantes learned of the campaign and decided to see how notification was being handled in his hometown.

Cervantes said notification in the Oxnard Union High School District was limited to a single sheet buried inside a handbook sent to families at the start of the school year. The page provided parents the opportunity to object to the release of student information but did not specify that the military would have access to the data.

Officials now have agreed to send out a special notice -- affixed to the cover of the student handbook -- calling attention to the opt-out form and providing explicit information about who could get the data.