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.