ACLU Fights Military Recruiters
Posted on October 30, 2005
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky has urged state school leaders to do a better job informing parents of their right to keep their child’s information away from military recruiters.
A provision of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to provide names, addresses and phone numbers to recruiters or risk losing federal funding — unless parents “opt out.”
But the law didn’t specify how schools should notify parents of that right, and procedures vary among schools.
State ACLU director Beth Wilson said some schools are putting the notices in handbooks or newsletters rather than providing separate forms to students.
“School officials have the duty to respect that privacy right,” said Wilson, who recently sent a letter to 176 school superintendents.
This fall, about 24 percent of Louisville public high school students opted to keep their information private, up from about 20 percent last year, according to district data.
“We have tried to be neutral. Certainly we want to support military, but we don’t want to be part of the recruitment effort,” said Jim Sexton, principal at Eastern High, where notices appeared in a parent-teacher association newsletter.
Recruiters say information from schools helps them to make home visits and calls and to send promotional material.
Joe Burks, assistant superintendent for high schools in Louisville, said the district would consider adopting a uniform notification procedure next year. The current idea is placing a notice in the district’s student handbook and making forms available at schools, he said.
Wilson urged the district to rethink that plan, which she said “doesn’t guarantee parents and students will be informed.”
Burks said the district would try to balance concerns.
“There are kids that want to go into the military, whether the ACLU likes it or not,” he said.
Kentucky education officials let districts decide how to notify parents and do not track the results.
In May, the ACLU sued the Albuquerque Public School District in New Mexico, accusing it of inadequately informing parents. The San Francisco school board was forced to revise its policy of barring recruiters from schools, according to the National School Boards Association. Source
Here’s an idea. How about parents reading the Student handbooks. For the ACLU, who pretend to be concerned about these kids’ privacy, an opt out is not good enough. What is ironic is that if one were to join the ACLU, they would be bombarded with junk mail from all kinds of left wing groups. They pass out your personal information to all kinds of third parties. Take a look at this liberal’s experience with junk mail from leftist organizations due to the fact of joining the ACLU.
Not even a week had gone by before the deluge began. Big, thick colorful envelopes arrived, not from ACLU, but from Sierra Club, Americans United for the Separation of Church & State, the Nature Conservancy, Americans For This, Americans for That, Yadda Yadda Yadda. Organization after Organization after Organization. Most of them I had never heard of.
He went on to correspond with them until he finally got removed from their third party lists, and actually got them to add…are you ready for this?….an “opt out” choice on their sign up form. If you go to the ACLU’s website to join up, and you look very carefully, you will find a small “opt in” button that is preselected. If you don’t want the junk mail, you can uncheck it. So putting the information to opt out of having your information available to military recruiters is inadequate for the ACLU, but a preselected “opt in” feature to receive junk mail from third parties on the ACLU’s sign up form, is o.k.?
Further more, how can the ACLU advocate parental notification for a military recruiter to offer an 18 year old a job opportunity, and have them make up their mind, but be against notifying a parent for a 13 year old to make the heavy decision of an abortion? Could there be some kind of biased view against the military?
I would think the ACLU could find more pressing matters to be involved in, like, I don’t know, perhaps some civil liberties being violated?
On another anti-military topic: Pirate’s Cove is asking for a lawsuit against the anti-American Scumbag Michael Crook, who has posted a picture of McDonalds Arches on his anti-American website Oppose The Troops, that reads “over 2,000 dead scumbags! Huzzah!” I think we all know who the real scumbag is.
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Its amazing how hypocritical this world can be, especially by a group that is supposedly “for the people.” Great blog and thanks for stopping by!
It would help also if the Pentagon didn’t violate the Privacy Act in its creation of recruiting databases.
One thing the students’ parents should consider in restricting the distribution of information for recruiters is that the ACLU, masking their intentions under the guise of protecting them AND their children, is the fact that our military can no longer depend on he draft to fill quotas of enlistment. To deny this access to possible enlistees is to deny the military the numbers needed for National defense of our country. Whether we like it or not, we have to have a trained military defense especially with the turmoil and the terrorism all over the world today. The alternative to the preferred manner of enlistment must be the draft. The ACLU is forcing the government to consider that alternative in order to defend our country, or do they prefer we just do away with our military and give our country and our freedom away?