COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Student Privacy
High Schoolers Just Saying ‘No’
Jacqueline Reis, Telgram & Gazette
February 12, 2006
WORCESTER— The number of Worcester high school
students who withhold their contact information from
military recruiters has grown by leaps and bounds over
the past few years, an increase that roughly coincides
with when the school started sending parents an
opt-out letter.
Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools
must release to recruiters the names, addresses and
telephone numbers of public high school students who
are in at least 11th grade or who are at least 17
years old unless a parent or student has opted out of
providing the information.
The percentage of Worcester high school seniors who
opted out this year ranges from 41.4 percent at
Burncoat High School to 13.9 percent at South, but an
education specialist for the Army recruiting battalion
that includes Worcester recently estimated that as
many as 50 percent of high school students in the
region choose not to release their information.
Some observers believe, however, the message that
students can opt out is not reaching all Central
Massachusetts families uniformly. It’s up to
individual districts to decide whether they will
mention the issue in a student handbook and/or send a
separate form home, possibly in more than one
language. The Wachusett Regional School Committee
recently voted to send a letter home starting with the
2006-07 school year. The opt-out option is now
mentioned in the student handbook, but only six
students out of 898 11th and 12 graders opted out this
year, according to the guidance department at the
district’s high school in Holden.
Fitchburg makes the opt-out form the second page of
the student/parent handbook, and the high school had
181 students opt out this year, said Principal Richard
D. Masciarelli. Quabbin Regional High School in Barre
posts opt-out information in its student handbook and
in a fall newsletter and had seven students opt out.
Shrewsbury sent a newsletter and had five students opt
out, according to the high school’s guidance
department, while Northbridge High School did not have
anyone respond to the notice in its handbook,
according to its guidance department.
Kevin M. Ksen and Michael D. Benedetti, local
activists and volunteer reporters for
www.worcester.indymedia.org, look at the variation in
approaches and response rates and see a civil rights
and privacy issue. The two have created a Web site,
optout.pieandcoffee.org, to track the percentage of
students opting out and offer instruction on how to
opt out. In some districts, Mr. Benedetti said,
“you’re just seeing differences in how well an
administration can communicate.”
Worcester School Committee member Joseph C. O’Brien
does not believe that’s the case in Worcester. Mr.
O’Brien led the effort to send opt-out forms to
Worcester families several years ago and recently
requested the opt-out figures for the city.
Approximately 18 percent of Worcester’s 11th and 12th
graders opted out this year, which he said sounded
like a fair reflection of the community’s attitudes.
More seniors than juniors opted out in Worcester.
Overall, roughly a quarter of the city’s seniors opted
out, not including the relatively small number of
seniors at the Advanced Learning Laboratory and
University Park Campus School.
The number of 11th and 12th graders who decided to
withhold their contact information has gone “way, way,
way” up in the last three years, said Deputy
Superintendent Stephen E. Mills, although he added
that he’s not sure if “it’s the form or if it’s
foreign affairs” driving the increase.
Worcester Peace Works, a local peace-advocacy
organization, hopes to increase the opt-out numbers
and this year asked for the same access to students
that military recruiters have, said activist Gordon
Davis. The group consists mostly of volunteers, so
they don’t make it into schools more than about once a
year. Once there, they talk to students about peace
organizing, conflict studies and related subjects. The
goal is to give them an alternative point of view and
persuade students not to join the military, Mr. Davis
said.
Students who don’t opt out, who allow their
information to be released to recruiters, can expect a
phone call or mailing, military recruiters said.
Air Force Master Sgt. Larry A. Stewart said the Air
Force usually uses high school lists to mail out
information and see who responds. “It’s like fishing,”
Sgt. Stewart said. Those who opt out of being on the
list are “expressing their freedom to say no, the same
freedoms we protect,” he said.
One of the recruiters he supervises said he doesn’t
use the high school lists much at all. Senior Airman
Gabriel Rosa, who works out of Worcester, was the
leading Air Force recruiter in New England last year.
“It’s the way I do my business. I don’t concentrate on
those lists very much,” Airman Rosa said. “I do school
visits.”
He said he goes to cafeterias and classrooms, places
where politeness alone makes students more likely to
listen than they would if he was on the phone. If
anyone’s interested, he invites them to the recruiting
station.
“It gives them more of a sense of this is a job
interview and this is not me begging them to join my
branch,” he said. “That’s the kind of responsibility I
want them to learn. … I don’t do house visits.”
Local Army recruiters take a different tack, using the
lists to call students, said Northbridge resident Carl
Bradshaw, chief of public affairs for the Army’s
Albany Recruiting Battalion. “It’s typically pretty
quick, and it basically asks them if they’ve thought
about the military and what their career goals and
plans are,” Mr. Bradshaw said. Army recruiters prefer
to meet the student at home with their parents,
because “the parents are much more skeptical about
having their children go off to war,” he said.
The battalion, which covers Worcester and other
Central Massachusetts communities, Western
Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, eastern New York
and northern New Jersey, has not met its recruiting
target in more than four years, Mr. Bradshaw said. He
attributes that shortfall mainly to the conflict in
Iraq. The armed forces as a whole have met their
nationwide active duty recruiting targets since August.
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