COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Student Privacy
Documentary: Law Gives Military Access to Student Data
David Goldstein, TruthOut
June 20, 2007
Washington - It began as a class assignment for Alexia Welch andSarah Ybarra: Make a five-minute video news story about advertising
in public schools.
But the Lawrence, Kan., teenagers' project snowballed into a
25-minute documentary on how the federal No Child Left Behind law to
improve education promotes military recruitment, infringes on
students' privacy and encourages school officials to look the other way.
The movie's fans include a Democratic California congressman
who's been trying to change the law for two years and award-winning
liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who viewed some early rushes and
offered the pair his lawyer's services, just in case.
Their film, "No Child Left Unrecruited, " premiered in April at
an arts center in Lawrence, the home of the University of Kansas. A
short trailer on YouTube has gotten 630 hits in the past month, and
the film made its Washington debut Tuesday.
"We found out this wasn't a school assignment anymore," said
17-year-old Ybarra, who'll be a senior next fall at Lawrence High
School. "This was going to go beyond the walls of the district."
So there they were Tuesday, the two teenage auteurs from Jeff
Kuhr's broadcast media class, at a screening in the basement of the
Capitol, hosted by their congressional patron, Rep. Michael Honda.
"You get an A plus," said Honda, who was a schoolteacher and
principal before he came to Washington.
Eighteen-year- old Welch, who just graduated, said she and Ybarra
just wanted to answer questions about the rules surrounding
military-recruiting policies. They didn't anticipate the fuss.
"All this other stuff blew us away," she said. "I don't think we
ever thought about a Washington screening."
The idea came to Welch last summer when a contract Army
recruiter wrote and offered her $100 if she'd enlist. She wondered
how he'd obtained her name, address and telephone number.
They discovered that a little-known provision of No Child Left
Behind, which President Bush signed in 2002, requires schools to give
the military personal information about their students. Otherwise,
the schools' federal aid could be at risk.
Welch and Ybarra found that their high school published all that
information and more age, gender, date of birth and parents' work
phone numbers in the high school directory, which anyone can buy for $2.
Students could opt out of the directory, they learned, but few
knew that they could. And the consequences of that would be not
seeing their names listed in the yearbook or school newspaper or on
the honor rolls.
The film follows Welch and Ybarra's odyssey "down the rabbit
hole" as they question school officials about the ease with which the
military can breach student privacy, and the roadblocks that face
parents who seek to keep the data out of reach.
Welch and Ybarra contacted Honda after an Internet search showed
that he's been trying to amend No Child Left Behind so that military
recruiters couldn't get access to the information without parental consent.
The law is up for renewal this year. Honda's bill has 57 co-sponsors.
Welch and Ybarra said their film wasn't about the military's
right to recruit students which Welch said she had no problem with
but more about "making sure no question is left unanswered," Ybarra said.
Welch said she'd probably enroll at the University of Kansas
next fall and might study journalism. Ybarra has another year of high
school but has become passionate about documentaries.
For now, everyone involved is just enjoying the ride.
"This has been an amazing opportunity for all of us," said Kuhr,
who accompanied the pair to Washington. "I mean, we're in the
basement of the Capitol. Pretty cool."
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