Not every parent wants kids to be all they can be
Military recruiters have ventured onto high school campuses for decades, but only in recent years have they begun routinely calling graduates at home, a move that’s angered some Santa Monica parents and students.
Under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, every high school in the country is required to provide military recruiters with a directory of its upper-class students. Though parents can request that their children be taken off the list, many have been caught unaware by calls at home.
“It was after dinner,” said Carol Wells, whose 18-year-old daughter, Dara, graduated from Santa Monica High School last spring. “The phone rang and I get a call asking for Dara, and I thought it was a little odd because any of her friends know she’s at school.
“He wanted to talk to her,” added Wells, who said the recruiter didn’t immediately identify himself. “He wasn’t interested in talking to me, for obvious reasons. The younger the kids are, the more vulnerable they are to their shticks, to their attempts at recruiting.”
Wells, who works for a nonprofit organization in West Los Angeles, said she went “ballistic.” She said it was unfair for the military to solicit new recruits at home, adding the process for parents to remove their children from the list needs to be more widely publicized.
“If people want their kids in the military, God bless them, that’s great,” she said. “But the people who don’t want their kids recruited, and the kids who don’t want to be recruited, need to have that right.”
Samohi Principal Ilene Straus said the school distributed a form last school year informing parents of the school’s new obligation. Like with having recruiters on campus, Straus said the home telephone calls didn’t seem to be a problem for most parents and students.
“For the parents that do not want their students contacted, then they’re taken out of that,” Straus said Friday. “We dealt with the issue and it seems to not be a problem... A high school’s job is to help kids get ready for after high school. The military for some students is a viable option.”
To be removed from the list that is supplied to military recruiters, guardians must fill out a form to that effect, sign it and mail it to the high school. The forms are available at the Samohi Web site, by following the “Administration” heading to the “Release — Student Info” link.
Not all parents have the access and know-how to find the form, argued Wells, who said the PTA ought to help distribute the information.
“If people are computer literate, which not all the Samo parents are, if they’re not on the other side of the technological divide, which a lot of Samo parents are, then they can get the information — but I have a lot of friends whose kids went to Samo that said, ‘I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know that was possible,’” Wells added. “It’s not easy to do.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 19, 2005. Read the original PDF.