Amerikan Military: All Your Children Are Belong To Us

Sharon Shea-Keneally, principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, was shocked when she received a letter in May from military recruiters demanding a list of all her students, including names, addresses, and phone numbers. The school invites recruiters to participate in career days and job fairs, but like most school districts, it keeps student information strictly confidential. "We don't give out a list of names of our kids to anybody," says Shea-Keneally, "not to colleges, churches, employers -- nobody." But when Shea-Keneally insisted on an explanation, she was in for an even bigger surprise: The recruiters cited the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's sweeping new education law passed earlier this year. There, buried deep within the law's 670 pages, is a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only with access to facilities, but also with contact information for every student -- or face a cutoff of all federal aid. <snip> http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2002/45/ma_153_01.html

At 09:20 AM 11/07/2002 -0800, our local weapon of mass destruction forwarded:
George HW Bush said he'd be the Education President, and he certainly was an education. You just have to parse his statements carefully. The new Bush isn't as good at grammar, so sometimes he's harder to parse, but as he says "fool me once, shame on you, um, fool me um,, can't get fooled again". He isn't really the same as the old boss, because the old boss was competent as well as evil... More seriously, though, it's another example of the difference between data protected by technology and data protected by laws. The old Buckley Amendment had some really hard-core protection for student records, though it probably had holes in it for things like military recruiting, and the military certainly did use any approach it could to keep track of potential draftees and potential recruits. But that's all gone now - it wasn't Constitutionally set in stone, and most of it probably wasn't directly driven by court orders, so the legislature can bounce it any time they want, even if they don't realize what they're signing.
participants (2)
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Bill Stewart
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Major Variola (ret)