Group helps educators reach out to ‘suddenly military' children

  • Published
  • By Rudi Williams
  • American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON (AFPN) --  Because of the high number of National Guardsmen and reservists fighting the war on terrorism, the Military Child Education Coalition has created a program to teach educators and others how to help "suddenly military" children of deployed citizen Soldiers.

The coalition established a workshop called the Supporting Children and Families of Guard and Reserve Institute. The institute is a professional development program to help teachers, counselors, administrators and guardsmen and reservists and their families to reach out to the children of guardsmen and reservists.

"What we talk about in this course are issues and insights to the kinds of things that children will deal with when a parent deploys," said Joan Barrett, chair of the coalition’s Guard and Reserve initiative. The coalition ran a session of the workshop before its recent conference in Atlanta.

"What moms and counselors are going to find, hopefully, are clues to resilience -- how to deal with their child as (he or she experiences) the loss of the other parent to deployment, and give (the child) some tools on how to come back and be a stronger, more resilient child as a result of this," Ms. Barrett said.

Most workshop participants are volunteers or employees of Guard and Reserve family programs nationwide, Ms. Barrett said. Other attendees are school counselors who are "cognizant of the need to support the kids whose parents have been deployed," she said.

"I think this is a phenomenal opportunity for school personnel to become aware of what the issues and identifiers are for their children whose parents are deployed," Ms. Barrett said.

The purpose of the institute is to identify key folks within each state's department of education, Ms. Barrett said.

"We try to focus on one state at a time and identify key educators, administrators and student-service personnel," she said. "Workshop participants will take back information and concepts to the personnel in their districts.”

Guardsmen and reservists are typically not clustered around military installations, Ms. Barrett said.

"So, therefore, they don't have the same support services as active-duty personnel," she said. "They may not even be aware of what's available to their kids."

The workshop helps participants understand what children's reactions to a parent's deployment might be.

"Focus is the child," Ms. Barrett said, adding that, "there's an essential connection between what happens to that child and the parent that's left behind, or the caregiver that's not the parent -- the aunt, uncle, grandma."

Walter Yourstone, the education coalition’s project director, said the nature of Guard and Reserve duty has fundamentally changed with the war on terrorism.

"We've gone from a mindset where Guard and Reserve duty meant one weekend a month, two weeks a year, to a dynamic where many guardsmen and reservists have been mobilized in the U.S. or deployed overseas to combat duty," said Mr. Yourstone, a retired Navy submarine captain from Kings Bay, Ga.

He said deployments are happening more frequently, for longer periods of time, and they are into combat zones.

"We're also seeing the cycle repeating itself where some servicemembers are on their second, possibly third, deployment in support of the global war on terrorism," Mr. Yourstone said.

"What we're seeing is something that the active duty realizes -- the necessity to provide strong family-support structures," he said.

The workshop also discusses the types of challenges families and children face through the process of deployment and the emotional cycle of deployment. This includes preparation for return and the homecoming itself.

Organizers ask participants to identify people who can sponsor support networks for these "suddenly military families."

Since all states are affected by the war on terror, the education coalition is trying to get as many states involved as possible, Mr. Yourstone said.

He said the first such workshop was conducted in Texas in 2004 and several workshops were piloted during the past school year, training 241 people.

"We sat down in November 2004 and tried to craft a concept of this institute," he said.

The coalition plans to conduct training sessions in eight more states by the end of the year. They include Georgia, Florida, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, Texas and Maryland. The organization earmarked these states because of their large numbers of deployed guardsmen and reservists, said Larry Moehnke, the coalition’s chief of staff.

On average, each state has had at least 4,000 deployed at any given time, he said. Ultimately, the coalition hopes to bring the workshop to 25 states annually.