USA: Students, parents rebuff military recruiters

By Kate Randall:

17 November 2005

Students and parents are reacting to increasingly aggressive tactics by US military recruiters on high school campuses across the country.

Unable to meet recruitment quotas and facing growing opposition to the war in Iraq, the Pentagon has boosted its advertising budget, launched a new TV ad campaign, and contracted a private firm to compile a massive database of potential recruits, some as young as 16 years old.

Since 2002, under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law, high schools are required to provide the military with lists of students—including their names, addresses and telephone numbers.

Students, or their parents, must make a written request to their schools to have their names taken off the lists.

In Massachusetts, more than 5,000 high school students in five of the state’s largest school districts have asked that their names be removed from the recruitment lists.

In Boston, about 3,700 students, or close to 20 percent of those enrolled in the city’s high schools, have opted out.

At Cambridge Rindge and Latin school in nearby Cambridge more than half the students, or about 950, have requested that school administrators not pass their names on to the military.

Related articles

• On the Anniversary of the War in Iraq: Reflections from a Peace Activist (artpredator.wordpress.com)
• Sessions: Kagan Defied Law on Military Recruiting (legaltimes.typepad.com)
• Ashamed (rmkellar.wordpress.com)