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As the war on terror rages on,
a battle is brewing in Minnesota and
nationwide over recruiting high school students for the military. It
may be coming to a fair near you.
Some parents and a few students
themselves are pushing back against a
federal law that requires schools to help military recruiters reach
juniors and seniors. They want schools in Minneapolis, Seattle and
elsewhere to do more to let parents and students know how they can
keep military recruiters from calling.
At the same time their efforts
are intensifying, the Department of
Defense is increasing its recruiting efforts. The department has hired
a private marketing firm to build a giant database filled with not
only names and numbers but also with the ethnicity, grade-point
averages and scrambled Social Security numbers of students 16-18.
While privacy advocates charge that the government is overstepping its
authority, the department maintains that the database -- with 13
million names so far -- is simply a way to streamline student
information that has always been collected.
All this comes at a time when
the Army's recruiting efforts are
heating up. Summer is a busy time for recruiting with so many high
school graduates pondering their next move. This summer is even
hotter, with the Army having missed its quotas for four of the past
five months. In June, the Army met its active-duty goals because of a
surge in the number of soldiers re-enlisting.
Pro-con recruiting
Army recruiters will be out in
full force this month at county fairs,
street basketball tournaments and music concerts. Anyplace where they
are likely to find those in their target market: 17- to 24-year-olds.
Recruiters aim to separate the
Army portrayed on TV from the real one,
said Mary Lou Eckstrand, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Recruiting
Company Minneapolis.
"We do a lot more than just
shoot weapons," she said. "We're out there
in Iraq reconstructing schools, political systems, helping them become
more democratic, redoing their water supply system -- all those things
that are so vital to a nation trying to go independent."
Recruiters aren't the only ones talking about a military career.
Counter-recruiters are out there,
too, trying to drum up support for
their cause and to give young people the "real" information about
what
they can expect if they join the military.
In Minnesota, a group known
as Youth Against War and Racism (YAWR) is
circulating a petition aimed at blocking recruiters' access to
students through schools. The petition asks state and local education
leaders to ensure that every student and parent receives an opt-out
form and a clear warning that failure to fill it out this fall will
result in recruiters obtaining students' names and contact
information. It also asks school leaders to stop allowing the military
to use the schools as recruiting grounds.
"The idea is to win people
over to our side, so that the recruiters
are met with such resistance when they come to the schools that they
don't see the point in coming anymore," said Brandon Madsen, 18, a
self-described socialist and a recent graduate of Bloomington Kennedy
High School.
In addition to the petition
drive, Youth Against War is planning a
student walk-out this fall to draw attention to the recruiting issue.
It's the law
Military recruiters calling high
school students is nothing new,
military observers say.
However, requiring schools to cooperate is.
Recruiters have had access to
student directory information since 1982
when Congress passed a law stating that in order to effectively carry
out its constitutional authority to raise and support armies, "It is
essential that the Secretary of Defense obtain and compile directory
information pertaining to students enrolled in secondary schools
throughout the United States."
Although high schools tended
to cooperate with recruiters by granting
them access to names and numbers of the older students, they were not
required to do so until 2001 when Congress passed the No Child Left
Behind Act. More...
Under the law, schools must comply
with recruiters' requests for the
names, addresses and phone numbers of students in the 11th and 12th
grades or risk losing federal dollars. Some students on the lists are
as young as 16, which has angered many parents. However, military
leaders stress that recruiting efforts focus on 17- and 18-year-olds.
Even though the law has been
around for several years, resistance to
the access to students picked up in the last school year.
A congressman from Calfornia
has proposed a bill to change the
"opt-out" provision to an "opt-in" system so that schools
would not be
allowed to give out student information to military recruiters without
written permission from parents. The National Parent Teacher
Association has endorsed the bill.
If the Iraq war makes recruiting
a tough sell to students, it's an
even tougher pitch to parents. Parents are considered the biggest
obstacle military recruiters face these days.
A recent Gallup Poll found that
52 percent of Americans said they
would support their child's decision to enter the military -- down
from 66 percent in 1999.
"Our biggest obstacle right
now are the influencers -- these are the
parents, aunts, ministers, teachers, counselors who obviously don't
want to see their child or friend or whatever go into harm's way,"
Eckstrand said. "Unfortunately there are a lot of us, we were brought
up during Vietnam. That sticks in our minds -- 'We're not going to do
that again.' That's the big thing."
Linnea Tani remembers Vietnam,
but she doesn't object to military
recruiters in schools. A pacificist who came of age during the Vietnam
War, she supported her daughter's decision to join the Air Force ROTC
program at the University of St. Thomas while studying nursing at the
College of St. Catherine.
"I would not feel comfortable
trying to talk her out of doing
something like that. It's her choice and it's not a bad choice," she
said. "I have utmost respect for those who make that choice."
Tani said her daughter, Stephanie,
surprised her when she came home as
a freshman at Roseville High School and talked about joining the Air
Force ROTC program someday in college. Military recruiters had been at
her daughter's school, Linnea Tani recalled, but their presence didn't
bother her.
"I'm able to separate what
I think we need, from my feelings about
whether I think it was the right decision to go to Iraq," she
explained. "There's a lot of good in the world, but we still need to
defend ourselves. I just don't think there will ever come a time -- in
my lifetime anyway -- that we don't need a military."
Charley Underwood, of Minneapolis,
said he was outraged when he
learned of the No Child Left Behind mandate regarding military
recruiters.
"I think that schools, no
matter how tight their budgets are, should
really think about the consequences of what could happen," said
Underwood, who has been a pacifist since he was a teenager. "I'm
really troubled by the fact that one of those kids at South is going
to be killed in Iraq."
He and his son, Erik, who just
graduated from Minneapolis South High,
worked with school officials to spread the word to parents and
students that they could avoid calls from recruiters by filling out
the opt-out form. But although he said he filled out a form for his
son, recruiters still called the Underwood home looking for Erik.
Erckstrand said Army recruiters
generally do not call people who have
requested not to be contacted, but occasionally there's a slip-up.
The military's current contact
with students sounds like standard
operating procedure, said Beth Asch, who studies military staffing for
the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank. What's new, she
observed, is that the public is starting to notice and react to the
armed services' recruiting tactics.
"That's good," she
said. "If we are in a war, we have to recruit good
people and they should understand how we do it."
Allie Shah is at ashah@startribune.com.
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