More than 30 years ago, Michael Cervantes was drafted fresh out of Oxnard High School, trained for combat and shipped off to the jungles of Vietnam where he fought for his country and the freedoms it represents.
As he sees it, he is fighting for those freedoms still.
For the last three months, the 55-year-old Army veteran has campaigned on behalf of student privacy, challenging a Bush administration policy that requires high schools to disclose student records to military recruiters or risk losing federal aid.
Working under the banner of Veterans for Peace, Cervantes and others recently succeeded in pushing Santa Barbara and Oxnard school officials to better inform parents about how to shield the student information from military review.
"All we want is for parents to be notified that they have this option," said Cervantes, who heads the Ventura County chapter of the antiwar group. "I don't think schools should be used to recruit in this manner."
School districts across California have wrestled with a desire to protect student privacy while complying with a mandate authorized by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act, the education law passed in 2001.
Under that mandate, recruiters are entitled to get the names, addresses and phone numbers of high school juniors and seniors, unless parents or students sign a form requesting that the data be withheld. Districts that don't comply stand to lose millions in federal funding. So far, no school district has had funding withheld for failing to comply with the law, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell said the recruiting tool has provided a more efficient and cost-effective method of finding those interested in military service.
At the same time, it has allowed the military to deliver its recruiting message to a wider audience as it seeks to maintain the country's all-volunteer fighting force, she said.
"This allows the Department of Defense to recruit from a much broader, diverse and more representative group of the youth of America," Campbell said. "But if a parent does not want [the information] to be provided to any organization, the Department of Defense being one, they can simply opt out."
The policy went into effect at the start of the 2002-03 school year and school districts have since been scrambling to spread the word. Some include the information in handbooks mailed at the start of the school year, accompanied by forms families can use to block the data from release.
