The resilience of America’s military-connected students

Emma is a 6th grader at Faith Middle School, a Defense Department-run school at Fort Benning. Her family, whose surname is being withheld because of Emma’s age, is moving again this summer.

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There are nearly 1.2 million American school-age children with one or more parents in the armed services, including active duty, the National Guard and the reserves. Educating them poses unique challenges and opportunities for officials across all levels of government. InsideSources conducted a number of interviews and visited Fort Benning to get a sense of the patchwork of federal programs, interstate agreements, and local initiatives designed to ensure that the academic and emotional needs of these children are met.

Military-connected children change schools far more often than their civilian counterparts. If their parents are deployed or have particularly demanding jobs, they regularly shoulder extra baggage.

After crisscrossing the globe and readjusting to a series of new schools before she turned ten, Emma had had enough.

“It all just kind of collapsed third grade,” she said, when her family settled at Fort Benning. Emma faced serious bouts of migraines, anxiety, and depression that led to her being homeschooled for a year.

Only about eight percent of military-connected students are educated directly by the Department of Defense Educational Activity (or DoDEA) schools, and Emma is now one of them. Over 50,000 of the more than 82,000 students in DoDEA schools are on bases overseas. But nearly 30,000 are part of the defense department’s “America’s” school system, mostly on domestic bases in the South. Because of their larger operating budgets and special design, these schools represent a model for how to best educate military-connected students.

But no matter how well prepared a school is to handle the needs of military-connected children, there is no way to completely alleviate the stress faced by those students. In interview after interview, experts, teachers, counselors and administrators remarked about the exceptional resiliency they see on a daily basis.

Living on the installation

According to the Military Child Education Coalition, or MCEC, students from military families tend to move six to nine times during the years they are in primary and secondary school, or three times more often than the average civilian child. Many of those moves are across state or national boundaries.

“Imagine you are an introvert, or you are quiet, or you are shy. You don’t get the opportunity to gradually integrate yourself into the school community,” Gerald Madler, a longtime counselor at Faith Middle School, said of the many new students who come to the school in the middle of the year. Madler and his colleagues said one of their main objectives is ensuring their students have an adult in the building they can open up to.

Despite the students’ transient lifestyle, scholastic achievement rates in DoDEA schools such as Faith are far above the national average. Some have suggested that in addition to the agency’s large per-pupil operating budget, the educators have the advantage of working with students whose parents are more involved and who are less likely to come from severe poverty.

The first-hand experiences of the counselors at Faith contradict some of those arguments. Though each child does have at least one parent who is employed full-time in the military, over 40 percent of the students are on free or reduced-price lunch (which is in line with nationwide statistics for military-connected children). Furthermore, a colleague of Madler’s, who said she has had experience in a public school “outside the gates,” rejected the idea that the Faith parents are always more involved.

Madler agreed: In a situation that is similar to that of many school counselors nationally, “the parents we least need to see are the ones who we are most likely to see.”

Another misconception from outside the gates, according to Madler, is an inflated emphasis put on the military parent’s struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or multiple deployments to war zones. While those issues can have a real impact on family life, Madler said that, by and large, the long periods of separation are what complicate a military-connected child's home-life, not the nature of a parent’s military occupational specialty.

The one exception, said Madler, is if “Dad or Mom can’t take off that Smokey Bear hat as a drill sergeant” when they get home to their family.

Even in those cases, however, the faculty and staff at Fort Benning are arguably better suited to empathize with the particularities of military life than their civilian counterparts. Many of the adults in Faith’s hallways are either former military or a military spouse. Furthermore, the school buildings themselves are in close proximity to housing clusters, giving the communities a small-town feeling.

“We really do get it — the military lifestyle,” said Madler, who served in the Army before getting his Ph.D. “We’ve been there, done that.”

Emma and her classmates say that having adults who understand the lifestyle is important, but the challenges remain. One seventh grader said she avoids making friends when she relocates to protect herself from the pain of having to separate when the next move comes along. Emma and her classmates regularly speak as if they themselves are in the military; they argue that they share their parent’s burdens and make real sacrifices for the Army.

“It’s part of us. If it’s part of our family, then it is part of us” said Emma.

One strategy that the administrators and counselors at Faith push is requiring each student to get involved in an after-school extra-curricular activity. Emma’s passion is music. She dances, sings, plays guitar, and DJs on occasion.

A study by the Army War College also found that military-connected students fare better when they believe their parents are making a difference and the country is behind the mission. The researchers made special note of the resiliency they observed in the military-connected students they spoke with, a theme that recurs repeatedly when talking to the adults who work with them every day.

Even Emma, who faced serious health-related setbacks that she attributes to her multiple moves, is able to see silver linings to the transient military lifestyle.

“It helps you reinvent yourself every time you move—it’s a good healthy change,” Emma said, putting on a brave face in anticipation of her next transition that will come when the school year ends.

‘The Most Important Asset We Have Here”

A mile or two down the road from Faith, in a plush conference room high up in the base’s central command building, retired Colonel George Steuber, the Fort Benning Deputy Garrison Commander, is effusive about the quality of the schools on base. Steuber, a Vietnam veteran, describes himself as the “city manager” for Fort Benning.

It’s a demanding job. The sprawling base has to support the comings and goings of tens of thousands of service members, private contractors, and civilian administrators on a daily basis. According to Steuber, every infantry, armor, ranger, and airborne recruit in the Army comes through Fort Benning at least once for training.

Because 70 percent of the service members stationed at the base live in the surrounding community and are not eligible to send their children to the DoDEA schools, Steuber’s team leads efforts to coordinate enrollment and outreach in the nearby traditional school systems. If they stay long enough to graduate from Faith, the students living on the installation all end up in one of the outside high schools because Fort Benning does not have a DoDEA secondary school.

The system works for the parents who are able to send their children to one of the five DoDEA elementary schools or to Faith, the only middle school, on the base. The transition to high school, however, can be daunting, as parents race to enroll their children in some of the selective magnet programs in the area. Though Steuber said the base is “surrounded by great schools,” state accountability reports for neighboring Muscogee, Chattahoochee and Russell counties paint a picture of average performance in states with below-average overall school systems.

Steuber has dedicated school liaison officers, who do everything from helping to make sure that incoming military-connected children’s academic credits are transferred properly to ensuring that incoming parents know when the cheerleading or football team tryouts are being held. The garrison commanders also promote an outreach program that sends service members into surrounding school districts for group and one-on-one mentoring with students. On the federal level, the government sends these school systems funds to compensate for lost local revenue, and DoDEA coordinates competitive grants to further supplement their operations.

Despite all these efforts, Steuber recalled examples of parents living off base who have tried to get legal guardianship of their children transferred to friends living on the installation so they could attend the DoDEA schools.

Part of the difficulty is that there is no comparing the budgets the school systems have to work with. According to DoDEA documents, the average annual tuition cost to the government for a student in the defense department schools in the Americas is between $22,000 and $24,000 depending on a student’s age, considerably more than the $8,300 per student that Muscogee County spends. DoDEA officials say that there are added costs associated with hiring teachers for their international system, and the Muscogee County figure does not include “transportation, school meals, facilities, debt service, and non-K-12 expenditures” according to the state report card website.

Steuber said he wishes there was room in the budget for a DoDEA high school on the base, a sentiment echoed by many of the stakeholders at Faith Middle School. Financial constraints, and the reality that the majority of the military-connected students stationed at Fort Benning are in K-8 grades, stand in the way.