Military Faces Parental Counterattack

Still, these are different times. With the Army having difficulty meeting recruiting goals and rumors about a draft continuing to circulate on the Internet, people are anxious.

"There is some angst,'' said Pat O'Neill, president of the Montgomery County School Board. "I think it's fallout from a not-favorable position to the war in Iraq." Montgomery schools recently gave parents the option of withholding their children's information from military recruiters on the student privacy forms they distribute each year -- something schools in Fairfax County also have done.

Parents in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties last month asked their school boards to better publicize military opt-out choices for parents.

The National PTA also is pushing for change. It wants the law rewritten so that students would have to sign a form saying they want their information released to the military, said spokesman James Martinez.

"We don't have anything against what the military is trying to do," he said. "We're just concerned about student privacy."

Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would rewrite the law so that families have to opt in rather than opt out of having their child's information released.

Jerome Brocks, a parent in the D.C. public school system, said he wants more than better information about opt-out forms. He would like the military to be kept away from students, period. Last year, when his daughter was a senior, he said, he grew alarmed by how aggressively recruiters behaved. Brocks said recruiters called his home and asked to speak to his daughter more than a dozen times.

"I just don't think the military should have a place in our schools,'' he said.

For their part, recruiters say they realize that parents have the right to remove their children's names from recruiting lists but are not certain what impact the opt-out campaigns will have on their efforts.

"Naturally, we'd like to speak to as many young people as possible to start a conversation about what the Army has to offer,'' said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command in Kentucky. "It's up to the schools to notify the parents of their options.''

In Montgomery County, Pat Elder, a parent at Walt Whitman, was among those who successfully lobbied the school system to change its student privacy forms to offer parents the option of restricting the release of student information to the military.

But Elder thinks school officials can do even more. He and other parents also are pushing for more consistent systemwide policies for how military recruiters operate on campuses.

"We need to put together systemwide regulations and go after area-wide and nationwide regulations," Elder said. "This issue resonates among parents, not just those who are antiwar, but those who are concerned about their children's privacy."