With a growing number of school boards advising parents not to give the state their children’s Social Security numbers, the law could be headed for repeal next year in Augusta, the Maine Civil Liberties Union said Thursday.

So far, school committees in 14 cities and towns have voted to recommend parents not give the state their children’s Social Security numbers, and/or passed resolutions recommending the law be repealed, said MCLU spokeswoman Brianna Twofoot. They are Auburn, Lewiston, Portland, Waterville, Sabattus, Brunswick, Bethel, Biddeford, Brewer, Kingfield, Winslow, Winthrop, Vassalboro and Bath.

Twofoot said several legislators are looking at sponsoring bills to repeal the law.

Meanwhile, Auburn Superintendent Tom Morrill said his district isn’t planning to send letters home to parents. Auburn plans to rely on a website being created by the Maine Department of Education that would allow parents to enter their children’s Social Security numbers themselves.

In Lewiston, letters to parents recommending they don’t give out numbers will go out in early October, school department spokesman Tom Jarvis said.

Poland Superintendent Dennis Duquette said Regional School Unit 16 directors have not yet taken any action.

The new law says schools must ask parents to give the state their children’s Social Security numbers, but parents don’t have to. Educators said the goal of the law, tracking how students do after they leave high school to see which schools and programs work, is a good one.

But tracking students into adulthood through Social Security numbers makes many uncomfortable, fearing a security breach could mean students could someday become victims of identify theft.

“School leaders are taking a stand for privacy,” Twofoot said, adding she hasn’t heard of any school board recommending parents give the state the numbers.

Meanwhile, the sponsor of the bill, Sen. Peter Mills, R-Skowhegan, called the opposition “a needless distraction” inflamed by the MCLU, which has encouraged school districts “to rise up in arms. … They love stuff like this,” he said.

Mills said he was asked to sponsor the bill by the Maine Department of Education, and agrees with it. Long-term tracking “is key to evaluation and performance.” Without that, effort is not being made to see which programs work, whether taxpayers’ money is being spent wisely.

Social Security numbers are now the only way to identify individuals. “Names and dates of births are not enough. No two people have the same number,” Mills said. Females often change their names when they marry. Many students move out of state.

And Mills said, the state and schools can be trusted as much or more as retail stores, e-Bay and other online merchants that consumers trust “with our credit cards and money,” Mills said. “The schools have all kinds of private information about kids.”

Mills said he wonders if some of the public resistance is fueled by schools that “don’t want to be evaluated over time,” or that schools don’t want one more job they’d have to do.

He agrees identity theft is a problem, but said schools are already dealing with a lot of sensitive student information. Some on the left see the law as violating privacy rights, while some on the right see it as “a paranoid government intrusion,” he said. They’re forgetting the goal is to improve the public education of students, Mills said.

The MCLU disagrees with Mills, and said if the Maine Department of Education is determined, a better way is to give students an individual tracking number to follow them, creating something like the “Infinite Campus” that schools now use to allow them to check grades.

If that number got in the wrong hands, it wouldn’t be as valuable as Social Security numbers, she said. “This is an opportunity for Maine to lead the country by setting an example” in creating a system, she said.

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