COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Student Privacy
Opt-out: Many high schoolers shun military recruiter contact
Pat Schneider, The Capitol Times
September 21, 2007
Many parents and students at Madison's East High School added a newform to the stack of papers they filled out at registration. They
"opted out" and signed a form withholding contact information from
military recruiters, at the invitation of Truth and Alternatives to
Militarism in Education -- "TAME" Wisconsin.
"A lot of people are saying they're glad we're here," said Vicki
Berenson, an East High parent staffing the TAME information table at
10th grade registration.
Opt-out forms have been available at East registration in past years,
but few people noticed them, Berenson said. "Some kids said they've
already been contacted by recruiters."
TAME, a six-month-old organization that counts some 20 members, many
from the Madison Area Peace Coalition, is pressing local schools to
better inform parents and students that they can take their name from
the list of contacts schools must send the military under the No
Child Left Behind Act. The law also requires schools receiving
federal funds to give military recruiters the same access as colleges
and prospective employers.
TAME members' attempts to be on hand at recent local registration
sessions to highlight the opt-out option were met with mixed results.
Some schools let them in; others barred them. The group turns its
focus now to getting schools to sharpen their policies on how often
and why military recruiters may visit.
TAME member Allen Ruff sees the effort as an effective tool to fight
the war that will appeal to a broader number of people.
"Instead of more open-ended symbolic picketing, it's something direct
and immediate people can do," he said at a recent meeting of the
group. "What could be better than to close the tap of bodies for the war?"
National scope
The Madison effort to mute the influence of military recruiters on
minors is part of a growing nationwide "counter-recruitmen t" movement
to expose tactics and restrict the presence of military recruiters on
high school campuses.
Recruiters nationally and in Wisconsin say they're doing nothing more
than making students aware of their options like colleges do, but
protesters have ramped up their efforts, particularly in the wake of
a 2006 Government Accountability Office report that found
substantiated cases of recruiter wrongdoing rose by 50 percent from
2004 to 2005. The battle is in full display on the Internet. YouTube
alone has dozens of clips featuring both recruitment ads and
counter-recruitment responses.
The New York Civil Liberties Union this month released a report on
military recruitment in high schools and demanded that the New York
City Department of Education protect students from aggressive
recruitment tactics. In August, the Arizona state superintendent
chastised counter-recruiters in that state for a postcard campaigns
that demanded that high school students be taken off military
recruitment lists, saying adult hostility to the military was
educationally dysfunctional.
This week in Washington, counter-recruitment activists among the
thousands who protested against the war at the U.S. Capitol staged
sessions to train peace demonstrators from around the country to
fight high school recruitment in their hometowns.
Two prominent counter-recruitment activists, Aimee Allison and David
Solnit, authors of "Army of None," will be in Madison next week to
participate in a forum and other activities sponsored by TAME.
Opting out
A total of 2,232 of about 8,000 Madison high school students withheld
their names from military recruiting lists this year, compared with
495 reported by The Capital Times in 2003. But at East High last
month, most of the parents and students interviewed said they had not
been aware they had to sign something to prevent recruiters from
getting their number.
"We're kind of anti-military, " said Laurie Myers, who with daughter
Myriah filled in one of a couple hundred "opt-out" forms completed
that August morning. "She's getting plenty of mail from colleges and
that's the positive information I want her to get."
Junior Ivon Palacios didn't want her name off the military recruiting
list. She said she wanted to talk with a recruiter because she is
looking for a way to pay for medical school. " But I wouldn't want to
go overseas to war." Two cousins were in combat, she said. "It's too
hard on the family."
One mother questioned why recruiters were allowed to approach high
school students at all.
"Why do they have the right to solicit underage children?" asked the
mother, who like many interviewed for this article at local student
registration sessions, would not give her name.
"Even if you are 18, that's a hard decision to make -- especially
when we are at war," she said. "They tell them the benefits, but not
the downside. They don't tell them they might lose their lives."
East High Principal Alan Harris said making a place for TAME at
registration was consistent with the school's philosophy of giving
parents and students the information they need.
Paul Brost, principal at Monona Grove High School, declined TAME's
request to be present at registration, but the opt-out form was
available there, he said.
"We don't allow any signs up or anything anti-military. In my
judgment, the administration should not be advocating for or against,
just offering information on options," Brost said. "By the same
token, I understand that this has become more politically charged and
we try to be sensitive to that."
At Verona Area High School's registration, a table piled with forms
included one to keep a child's name and phone number from being
published in a student directory, but none for a family to opt-out of
the military recruiting system.
Parents at Verona said they weren't aware either that registering
their child for school meant the student's name would be sent to
military recruiters, nor that they could prevent that simply by signing a form.
Some parents said that did not concern them, but others said it did.
"We probably would have opted out, but we didn't see any information.
It wasn't pointed out to us," said one woman, registering a student
for whom she is legal guardian.
A mother filling out forms for her son as he registered for his
senior year said she knew nothing about opting out of the military
recruitment contact list. She recalled a recruiter who phoned her son
last year. "He kept pushing it," said the woman, who declined to give her name.
Community pressure has pushed area high schools to tighten up
policies and practices in allowing military recruiters access to
campus, especially the use of such features as obstacles courses and
climbing walls, which had been brought to gym classes at some schools.
Such visits now must count toward the three visits a year each branch
of the Armed Forces is allowed to make to high schools, said Ken
Syke, Madison School District spokesman. That policy now is a target
of Madison high school students active in counter-recruitment efforts.
Rebekah Rodriguez is a member of Students for Progressive Causes at
Memorial High School, which plans to approach the Madison School
Board with a proposal to tighten up the policy.
"The term 'visit' isn't really defined," Rodriguez said. "Recruiters
come to drop off brochures and linger in the parking lot for four or
five hours. If they don't sit down with the kids, it doesn't count as a visit."
TAME members also are affronted by what happens when recruiters do
sit down with students.
They say that recruiters target lower-income students without a clear
path to college and make promises they know they won't keep.
While military recruiters often are accused of targeting
African-American and Latino students who may have fewer college
options, Vets for Peace member Will Williams said "it's everyone at
the lower end of the economic spectrum, regardless of ethnicity."
Jamie Haack, 22, says she was targeted by military recruiters as a
student at Mount Horeb High School because of her working class
background. She said the recruiter with whom she met privately pushed
the idea that the military would be the only way she would be able to
afford college.
"I was offended," Haack, now a senior at Edgewood College, recalled
in a recent interview. "They wanted me to sign up right there. It was
very intimidating. "
She said she promised to think about the military, but became active
in the peace movement instead.
Reflecting the nation
But Pat Grobschmidt, public affairs officer for the Army Recruiting
Battalion in Milwaukee, said the Army tries to develop a fighting
force that reflects the nation, both in terms of race and income.
"We want to have an Army that looks like the people we represent,"
she said in an interview.
The Army regularly surveys youths on their attitudes towards the
military, and in 2005 reported that African-Americans as a group were
not disposed to enlist. That jibes with the broad outline of the U.S.
Army, where according to Grobschmidt, African-Americans are
underrepresented compared to their presence in the population,
Latinos about match their presence in the population, and Caucasians
exceed their presence in the population.
The Army's most recent survey found that recruits come from "middle
class" families with incomes ranging from $33,000 to $55,000, she said.
As for the counter-recruitment movement's complaint recruiting during
class time compels students to hear the Army's pitch, she said it's
the Army's duty to make students aware of their options.
"It no different from a college recruiter who talks about
opportunities or a corporation that talks about what it has to offer."
The risk of serious injury or death is discussed with every recruit,
she said, although not typically at a first meeting at school.
As the military closed out its recruiting year in mid-September, Army
Sgt. First Class James Wilson said local offices in east Madison,
Baraboo and Beaver Dam likely would meet their joint monthly goal of
20-plus new enlistees. Many who signed up recently opted for a
$20,000 bonus for agreeing to "quick ship," or start training within
30 days, Wilson said, but he declined to provide figures in a recent
interview at the Military Recruiting Center, which has offices for
the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force adjacent to an employment
agency near East Towne Mall.
As for high school students opting out of his contact list, Wilson
said that's better than the cussing out he sometimes gets when he
calls students' homes.
Lyman Woodman, a retired Navy recruiter who lives in McFarland, said
in an interview that a call list including contacts who oppose the
military has little value. "Why waste time tying to talk to someone
who isn't interested?" he asked.
But opting-out of the contact list is not the real agenda of the
counter-recruitment crowd, Woodman maintained.
"They are just anti-military, " he said.
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Other anti-war websites:
www.counterrecruite r.net
www.armywrong. net
www.yawr.org
www.projectyano. org
www.objector. org
www.afsc.org/ youthmil/
www.campusantiwar. net
www.militaryfreezon e.org
www.counter- recruitment. org/website/
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