Military Recruitment and Your Child: Cop Out or Opt Out


In the past, I’ve kept my daughters home from school, to avoid “fingerprinting” done by well-meaning PTA groups, Brownie troops etc. for the purpose of helping the police find my children if they were ever abducted.

I did that because I don’t want government agencies with that information. First of all, chances are they wouldn’t be abducted, and secondly, if the worst happened…I had tooth brushes, hair brushes etc. with DNA which is a better way to identify someone and I probably also had a million fingerprints belonging to them in their rooms, which could be lifted for a match.

Rather than write a “no permission” note and have my children stand out as the offspring of a paranoid…I just opted to keep them home from school that day.

Paranoid? Maybe, but with good reason, I think.

Today I found out that No Child Left Behind program includes something few people know about. Information gleaned about your child from this program is given to the United States military for their own use.

“A provision in the No Child Left Behind Act, which measures student achievement, also requires school districts to provide information about those students to military recruiters when asked,” says the AP.

“Military recruiters have the same access to student information as job recruiters, universities and other post-high school education agencies. School districts must provide the information if they receive any federal funding under the act --except in cases when students and their parents voluntarily opt out,” the article continues.

Yes, you can opt out of giving this information to the military, but you have to sign a letter saying so…only first of all, you have to know that opting out is an option in the first place. The vast majority of parents had no idea the information was going to military recruiters nor were they aware that they had any rights to keep that from happening.

We, as a nation, are getting terribly used to the idea that we don’t have as many rights as we once thought.

I was upset when I learned that TIVO kept a list of every movie you recorded. I was upset a long time ago when I noticed that my grocery coupons printed on the back of my sales receipt were directly related to what I’d purchased. So they were keeping a record of what I was eating for crissakes.

We have the unpatriotic PATRIOT act which allows more and more information to be stolen from us and collected about us.

Every keystroke we make on our computers can be found out by anyone and I’ve got more cookies in my hard drive than a dozen bakeries.

Big brother’s everywhere --in our libraries, our televisions, our computers, grocery stores, pre-schools and schools.

I’d like to opt out of all of that if I could.

But, at least parents can keep the military from sifting through their children’s school records as long as parents sign a letter requesting that this information is to be kept private.

Why do the military recruiters want this information? By seeing what electives your child takes, the grades your child makes, their extra curricular activities etc, they can prepare a very seductive sales pitch for joining the military.