Schools comply with military reporting rules

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(Host) Vermont schools have been complying with a new federal requirement that they turn over the names of students’ home addressees and phone numbers to military recruiters. Several principals in the central Vermont area say they’ve had just small numbers of students taking advantage of the option to ask that information about them not be given to the military.

Ben Scotch, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Vermont, says he worries that not enough has been done by schools to put out the message that students and parents can opt out:

(Scotch) “I think, in Vermont, the Department of Education has done a good job in advising schools that they should advise parents and students that the option exists. But there are inherent problems in ‘opt-out’ systems. We would have preferred an ‘opt-in’ system affecting high schools students.”

(Host) The new recruiting push is part of the No Child Left Behind Act, and schools that don’t participate risk losing federal funding.

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