Blocks Away, Army Recruits Teens

Students swarmed around the recruiting table, grabbing brochures, bags and Army key chains. Two brothers, both named Sgt. Johnson, regaled them with stories and encouraged them to consider joining up.

The U.S. Army table was one of the most popular tables in the crowded gymnasium as part of Wednesday’s college fair at Cambridge’s only public high school.

While it might be a common sight at most public high schools, at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the Army recruiters’ presence is a relatively recent development—and only brought about by new requirements of federal law.

Just a few blocks away from Rindge and Latin, a similar federal mandate at Harvard Law School (HLS) sparked fierce opposition from students and faculty. The issue is much less controversial at Rindge and Latin, however, drawing only quiet opposition from community groups.

The Force of Law

A provision buried in the No Child Left Behind Act gave military recruiters the right to come onto public high school campuses. The law also provided them access to students’ names, addresses and phone numbers.

The small amendment to the act—championed in Congress by Rep. David B. Vitter ’83, R-La.—has received little attention amidst widespread scrutiny concerning school accountability and funding.

The amendment was an “issue of

parity,” said Laura Rosche, a spokeswoman for Vitter, now a senator-elect. Before the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in 2002, she said, as many as 2,000 schools nationwide admitted college recruiters while refusing the military.

The act does provide for an opt-out process to the student information access provisions, which allows concerned parents to prevent the school from providing a student’s information to recruiters.

Caroline Hunter, an assistant principal at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, said that the school sends out letters every year alerting parents to the right to opt out of military notification.

“We think it’s much better to know what every parent thinks, rather than to just [assume],” Hunter said. “The letters go out every year, but the first year they went out, there was no war, so there...wasn’t the same focus,” she said.

Hunter said the school has received no complaints about the opt-out process.

But providing parental notice about the provision is a challenge in a diverse city like Cambridge, where many parents are not fluent in English, she said.

That’s where awareness campaigns from concerned community members can help, she said.

At 8 a.m. on the day after the presidential election, three members of the Cambridge Peace Commission huddled at the school’s door, handing out opt-out forms to students as they entered.

Students could take the forms home, get their parents’ signatures and return them to the school.

Hunter praised the efforts of the commission, a department of the City of Cambridge, calling it a “great service.’’

At other local schools, which often do less to promote opting out, volunteer groups play a larger role in notifying parents and students about the opt-out process.

Boston Public Schools include an opt-out notice in the centerfold of their parent handbooks, said Becky Pierce, an organizer with Dorchester People for Peace. To supplement schools’ notification, the group distributed at least 7,000 opt-out flyers in English, Creole, Spanish, and Cantonese to Dorchester students over the summer.

But military recruiters say the fervor over opting out is overblown.

“[The students] get one phone call from us,” said Michael Johnson, who directs recruiting for the U.S. Army at Rindge and Latin. “We’re not interested in talking to someone who’s not interested in us.”

A New Approach

Any recruiting at the school marks a significant change from past relations with the armed forces.

In 1991, military recruiting at the school ceased after school district hearings with the Cambridge Peace Commission and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, a city department charged with enforcing nondiscrimination ordinances.

“It wasn’t even a political decision,” Hoffman said. “It was recognizing a legal recommendation.”A city ordinance bans employment discrimination on several grounds, including sexual orientation, and the Human Rights Commission objected to the military’s policy of discharging openly gay and lesbian service members.

The rationale was similar to that given by the opponents of military recruiting at HLS, who focus on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which they say unfairly discriminates against openly gay and lesbian service members and violates Harvard’s non-discrimination policies.

The law school has only allowed the military on campus since 2002, when the government threatened to withdraw all funding to the University if HLS continued to enforce its non-discrimination policy against the military.

Similarly, while Rindge and Latin did begin allowing limited, one-on-one student meetings with recruiters in 1996, regular recruiting only resumed at the high school with the mandate of the No Child Left Behind Act. Cambridge Public School officials say the recruiting provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind Act override the schools’ non-discrimination policy.

Recruiting at Rindge and Latin now consists mostly of table displays in hallways or the cafeteria, according to Chuck Shaw, an education specialist with the Army’s New England Recruiting Battalion.

Last year, recruiting efforts at Rindge and Latin yielded two Army recruits, Johnson said. George Finn, a guidance counselor at the school, estimated that 2 percent of each graduating class go on to the armed forces.

And even though Cambridge maintains its non-discrimination policy, military recruiting at Rindge and Latin has drawn little public protest. What protest does exist focuses on anti-war objections.

“It’s a bad idea,” said Ruth E. Corona, a senior at Rindge and Latin. “They get [the idea] into students’ heads that they won’t get sent to the war that quick.”

Corona’s noted that both her brother, who graduated from Rindge and Latin last year, and his girlfriend enlisted in the Army. Corona said her brother will be sent to Iraq in February 2005.

“Kids should experience better things than learning to kill people,” Corona said. “It’ll be interesting to see if he’s changed when he gets back from basic training.”

Other critics suggest that the military is incompatible with public education, because of its “hard sell” tactics of promoting military service as a hyperreal video game.

But proponents emphasize that the military may be an appropriate career choice for some students, and that choice is essential.

Fred Fantini, a member of the Cambridge School Committee, said he voted against the decision to ban recruiting in 1991, and would vote for a ROTC program there if it were a possibility.

“The hallmark of what Cambridge represents is choice,” Fantini said. “People are very aware of the consequences of military [service], and kids need to be afforded ... a full range of traditional options,” he said.