TRENTON, NJ – A new bill being proposed in Trenton could alert teachers in the classroom to a student’s military-connectivity status.
The bill requires the Department of Education to maintain an indicator for military-connected students in its student-level database. This would be for U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, National Guard, Coast Guard and Space Force dependents.
The goal is to report on the performance of that subset of students overall in comparison to the general student population.
“The bill also requires the Commissioner of Education to annually report statistics on the academic engagement and outcomes of these students, including attendance rates, performance on the State assessments, and high school graduation rates,” the bill sponsored by Michael Torrissi, Brandon Umba and Cleopatra Tucker states. “The reported information must be consistent with the provisions of federal law that protect the confidentiality of student records.”
In today’s progressive educational environment, alerting a teacher about a student’s family military status might not be a good idea. As a college student and former U.S. Marine, many professors had pre-disposed bias against those who served in the military. That was 20 years ago. Today, anti-military and police sentiment has grown.
That’s why the bill also allows a parent or guardian to opt their child out of being identified as a military-connected student, in which case the student’s classroom teacher will not be notified upon enrollment.