Student personal information will go to military recruiters unless they opt out

ALERT!   All secondary students and parents should know about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) military recruitment list opt-out form and deadline for opting out!

AFSC Hawai’i’s CHOICES project, Truth2Youth, Maui Careers in Peacemaking, and the Kaua’i Alliance for Peace and Social Justice have worked for years to get the Hawai’i Department of Education to improve its “opt out” procedures for the military recruitment list created under the NCLB.  The forms were inaccessible and difficult to understand. Some schools did not notify students or notified students until after the deadline.  And there were cases where parents opted out and the names were still given to the military.

According to the Haleakala Times, when students were first allowed to opt out themselves in the 2006/2007 school year, the opt out roll jumped from 1,913 the previous year to 21,836, nearly a quarter of the secondary student body.

This year, we received reports that the opt-out forms were in the registration packets as we had recommended. A teacher at Farrington reported that he had a 4-inch high stack of student-completed opt-out forms.

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Students given chance to remove names from schools’ list given to military recruiters

By Star-Advertiser Staff

POSTED: 09:51 p.m. HST, Aug 30, 2010

Students and parents at state middle, intermediate and high schools have until Sept. 15 to remove their names from a national list given annually to military recruiters by the Department of Education under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The DOE has developed an opt-out form for military recruiting for students and parents, available for download on the DOE website. Students or guardians that submit the forms will have their names and contact information removed from a list sent to Inter-Service Recruitment Council in mid-October. Requests filed between 2007 and 2010 will be honored until the students leave the DOE system.

Request forms are accepted year-round, but may take longer to process if submitted after the Sept. 15 deadline. For more information, students and parents can call the DOE at (808) 692-7290.