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.