Student Privacy

By Tim Gnatek
Web Exclusive

Denise Holmes, mother of two students at Garfield High School in Seattle, Wash., was preparing dinner for her family one July evening when she heard a knock at the door.

Two navy officers, dressed in full uniform and armed with recruitment brochures, had come to speak with her 16 year-old son, Marcus, about considering military service.

"They were uninvited," said Ms. Holmes. "Marcus has no interest in the military, he's never even played with G.I. Joes," she said.

What most irked Ms. Homes about the calling was that the officers had singled out her son by name and address something she noted as a drastic step-up in pressure from recruiters' school lunch tables and direct mailings all despite submitting him to a military do-not-contact list at his school in May.

"I signed an opt-out form from school," she said. "I don't know how they're getting that information."

Schools have become data warehouses for military recruiters looking for eligible candidates. Bound by law to surrender contact information, school administrators have been pushed to comply with providing student lists for recruitment efforts, and families not wishing military contact are having a harder time avoiding their call.

Though school administrators have been unable to fully block the records grab, a rising voice of dissent led by parents and teachers are making the schools a kind of battleground of their own. They are forcing the issue by calling attention to the data collection, informing others how to remove children's names from military lists, and applying political pressure on policymakers to strengthen their students' privacy protection.

What has made their struggle all the more difficult is that there is a tangle of procedures to unfurl before names can be removed, which is easily confusing to parents. Schools are required to notify parents of the military list and students' ability to opt-out under the No Child Left Behind Act, but there is no requirement as to how the message is delivered. Another Department of Defense student record database, collected by the Joint Advertising and Marketing Research and Studies Office, requires no parental notification.

To better inform parents, when school resumes this fall at Garfield High School, the Parent Teacher Association will sponsor an awareness program about the stepped-up military efforts. "We'll have a table at open house, use an e-mail list, we'll put a special notice on the front of the form from the PTA, we'll talk with students about why their parents fill out this form," said Amy Hagopian, the PTSA chair at Garfield High School. "It will be a campaign."

In Sonoma, Calif., Sandra Lull, a school board member who pushed for Sonoma Valley High School to revise its methods of alerting parents to the opt-out option, believes a great share of the problem lies with a lack of guidelines for alerting parents to how student marketing data is collected. "The policy isn't just the issue; it's the implementation of the policy," she said.

Ms. Lull said that the No Child Left Behind alert was once squeezed onto the already crowded student emergency cards parents must complete each year. "The average parent needed a magnifying glass to see it," she said.

In response, the school board revised the alert policy, instead using separate forms with larger type. "Once that happened, the parents' opting out grew dramatically."

This year, when classes resume, her high school will go one step further in protecting student information issuing forms that parents can use to suppress release of information under No Child Left Behind and the Defense Department's database.

To help ensure that parents receive the message during "back to school" night, the school will host a table with information on student record privacy along with tables for school clubs and sports.