Student Privacy Rights and Counter Recruiting
We met with Georgia, DC, and Alabama Greens. Keep your ears open for a variety of opportunities to outreach with the southern Greens. Alabama will host a Sept 24th weekend event with Elaine Brown who is running for Mayor of Brunswick Georgia. And the southern Greens are also discussing on their list serve ways we can get together for fun and for party building.
and he shone brilliantly. Those who hadnt been exposed to Green Politics before, got a great lesson from Asa.
I also intend to volunteer to go to Maine in October to help work in the Campaigns in Portland. I attended a candidate workshop presented by John Eder and Stephen Spring in Tulsa. I am inspired to grow this party by running candidates, and they have many candidates running in the same city, where I can get an abundance of hands on. I realize they may be controversial to some as may my friendship and affiliation with the GDI crowd is with others. I am sorry if this distresses some, but I think there is much I can learn there, and I personally enjoyed getting to know them and hear the stories of the Maine Successes in Tulsa.
In fact, I happen to enjoy the company of many Greens in the many factions.
Let us not be political elitist.
Speaking of being in the Streets. I will be out at the high schools as kids return to school in support of the local counter recruitment programs this week. See info below on an amazing project that some of our local Greens are working on with other groups. My local school is Lake Worth High. It is said to be the largest ROTC program in the Country. I aim to help offer another choice.
Public Awareness Rallies for
Student Privacy Rights & Counter recruiting
The Department of Defense (DoD) plans to gather private student information to use to recruit public high school students. As part of an ongoing counter recruiting effort, a grassroots organization, The Truth Project, Inc. (a Florida not for profit corporation) in association with groups in other counties including Broward Anti War Coalition, Miami for Peace, Veterans for Peace, Palm Beach and Dade County Green Parties, Democracy for America, American Friends Service Committee, and Naples for Peace will hold Public Awareness Rallies in Palm Beach, Broward, Collier and Miami-Dade counties at the beginning of the 2005-06 school year.
Members of these organizations and other volunteers will be standing up for truth in military recruiting and preservation of privacy rights by distributing fliers and forms that students and parents can use to opt out of having the district share their private information. In addition, the groups will distribute forms that can be used to suppress students’ private information from the private marketing database purchased by the DoD to get around federal laws protecting student privacy.
The groups will be distributing fliers and forms at the following times and locations:
Dates | Location | Times | Group/Contacts |
August 10 & 11 | | | The Truth Project, Inc 561-715-9334 www.truthproject.info |
August 10 & 11 | - - - | | Veterans for Peace Patrick McCann 305-238-3361 Steven Wetstein 305-226-2480 Democracy for Sam Feldman 305-588-4247 optoutmiami@gmail.com |
August 10 | | | Broward Anti War Coalition Jim Sanders tenkeyvaluesjimbo@yahoo.com 954-770-7769. |
August 15 | | Contact | Noelia Rodriguez 239-455-0468 |
The coalition of groups intends to bring public awareness to the following facts:
- By law (No Child Left Behind Act, P.L. #107-110 Section 9528), student contact information including name, address, and phone number of all juniors and seniors must be released to the military upon request.
- By law (No Child Left Behind Act), parents and students have the right to OPT OUT by notifying their principals that they want their child’s private information to be given to colleges and higher educational institutions, BUT NOT to the military.
- By law, no student is required to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test administered in the districts’ high schools. The test is nothing more than a recruiting tool and has little application to civilian jobs or trades.
- By law, the military is allowed access to students during school hours for recruitment purposes.
- By law (the First Amendment to the Constitution) and by the decisions several federal courts ,students, parents and community members have a legal right of access equal to that of military recruiters during school hours to offer an opposing point of view.
- Government intrusion into the private lives of US citizens is increasing at unprecedented rates endangering rights and fundamental freedoms and rather than protecting people threatens their individual liberties.
- The DoD is working with a private marketing firm, BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, MA (using computers to analyze large amounts of data to target potential customers based on their personal profiles and habits). The DoD is using BeNow to create a database of all
- Parents and students can keep the DoD from prying through private firms and prevent recruiters from targeting or harassing them by opting out of the private database until privacy advocates can secure legal relief from government invasion of privacy.
The Truth Project, Inc., is a local, grassroots organization which formed in response to the increased funding for military recruiting in our local schools. The governor recommends spending $1.75 billion for school year 2004-05 on educating our children to think for themselves. The Department of Defense spends an estimated $3 to $4 billion of our tax dollars to recruit them into the front lines. The DoD knows more about our students than either the state of federal education departments. We think there is something drastically wrong with the way tax dollars are spent and which government agencies attend to students and students’ private information.
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