22 SEPTEMBER 2005
NYCLU Launches Campaign to Protect Students' Rights from Abusive Military Recruitment Tactics

For Immediate Release

Contact:
Sheila Stainback, 212-344-3005, ext. 244 or 917-573-7880
Maggie Gram, 917-402-8376
Donna Lieberman, 917-224-8879

The New York Civil Liberties Union has launched a major campaign against unwanted, abusive and intrusive military recruitment in schools.

As the new school year begins, the military embarks on another season of recruiting high school students, taking advantage of the student directory information and school access that they claim under the No Child Left Behind Act. The NYCLU’s campaign will arm students with the tools to fight this invasion of their campuses and their privacy rights.

“The military is setting its sights on vulnerable groups of young people as it tries to meet the demands for more soldiers to fight an increasingly unpopular war,” said Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the NYCLU. “We send our children to school for an education, not to become military targets. Unfortunately, little-noticed provisions of No Child Left Behind have given the military unprecedented access to students in school and an aggressive military has turned some of our schools into a recruiting ground. The NYCLU seeks to ensure that they respect the privacy rights of the children and do not interfere with education.”

As part of its campaign, the NYCLU will begin distributing a new fold-out palm card on students’ rights and military recruiting, entitled “No Student Left Unrecruited?”, outside high schools in New York City today. The pamphlet outlines students’ rights to resist recruiters’ invasions of their privacy, and it provides a tear-off form that students can submit to their schools to remove their names from the recruiting lists sent to the military.

Other aspects of the campaign also launched today include:

• a new NYCLU military recruiting Web site, accessible through the NYCLU’s site at http://www.nyclu.org, containing information on students’ rights, forms and legal information to help students, parents and educators protect student privacy rights, and other resources;
• a confidential complaint center where students, parents and educators can report problems with military recruiters;
• a series of meetings with the Department of Education and all New York State superintendents, in which the NYCLU is working with educators to help them replace ineffective parental “opt-out” procedures with an instant in-class student opt-out form that allows students to remove themselves from the lists;
• a program of Freedom of Information Act requests to the military and Department of Defense, seeking public disclosure of their policies and practices, and a series of letters asking how students, parents and schools can register complaints about the behavior of recruiters in schools.

As the military amps up its recruiting efforts in schools, attempting to reach ever-receding recruiting goals, many educators, students and parents have complained that recruiters are using heavy-handed tactics to harass students, violate students’ privacy rights, and target poor students and students of color. Under No Child Left Behind, school districts must produce lists of their students on demand to military recruiters, or the schools risk losing federal funds. In addition, recruiters must be given the same access to schools as colleges or prospective employers.

In some schools, military recruiters have made themselves a regular presence, making weekly visits and claiming extensive access to students. In the past there have been complaints of intimidation, deception and harassment by military recruiters in person, by telephone and by e-mail. Special military marketing materials specifically target students of color.

The NYCLU praised the NYC Department of Education for revising its procedures this semester to better protect student privacy as schools comply with military requests for student lists. New York City is one of the first school districts in the nation to adopt a student opt-out scheme which permits students themselves to withhold their contact information from the military recruiters by filling out and recruiting a form in class. Among the other improvements, the NYC DOE has agreed to give students and their parents more time to exercise their right to opt out. Students will have until mid-October to opt out and will be able to have their names removed each year.

The NYCLU will be monitoring the new procedures to identify problems and remains deeply concerned that military recruiters have been given extraordinary access to students in some schools well beyond what is required by the law. In addition, the NYCLU will assist students and activists who engage in advocacy in the schools for alternatives to military service.

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