http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1219/p13s02-legn.htmlLast summer Mark Spencer's 17-year-old son received a phone call from a military recruiter. Mr. Spencer told the recruiter not to call his son again. An hour later, the recruiter called their Mesquite, Texas, residence a second time. The next week he left phone messages.
"It's a predatory practice," says Spencer, "to keep calling students even if their parents object."
-snip-
"It's a George W. Bush thing," says Santa Cruz, Calif., school board commissioner Cece Pinheiro, referring to the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind federal education act, which became law in 2001. "We've been fighting this for some time."
Deep in the education law's 670 pages lies a provision that requires public secondary schools to give military recruiters the names, addresses, and phone numbers of their students (mainly high school juniors and seniors). Some school districts responded to the new law by designing consent forms. Unless parents signed them, information about their children was not sent to the recruiters.
-snip- (this part of the article explains the consent form hoopla the gov. is causing, etc.)
Spencer has since hand delivered his consent forms to his school district in Texas to get both of his sons off the military's recruiting list.
He says he would have rather not gone to the trouble, but plans to remain vigilant. "It's up to parents to tell the schools that, where military recruitment is concerned, they'd prefer their children be left behind."
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