Supporting Students With Deployed Parents
“Why does Daddy have to go back?” 7-year-old Tyler kept asking.
It had been three years since Tyler’s father, a U.S. Army captain, returned from Iraq after a seven-month deployment. Now he was leaving again -- for an even longer tour -- and the boy was nervous and upset.
“Well, there are other daddies who have been in Iraq, and they have to come home to see their kids,” Tyler’s mother, Alison Sakimura explained as best she could. “And other daddies have to go” and take their place.
The boy asked: Will Daddy come back?
Sakimura answered truthfully: “Daddy wears a helmet to protect his head, and a vest to protect his heart, and carries a weapon. We just have to pray to God to watch over him.”
That was in 2006, shortly before Capt. Greg Sakimura, a company commander in the 82nd Airborne, began a 15-month tour of northern Iraq. He returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., last fall; Tyler, who had bravely dubbed himself “Little Dad” to help his mother and two younger siblings in his father’s absence, went back to being just another third-grader at Ed V. Baldwin Elementary School.
But Baldwin Elementary is not just another school. More than half its students have parents in the military; and, like similar children attending other schools on or near military bases, they must confront challenges and stresses that most children would never dream of. These include long separations from a parent and fears that loved ones may not return.
“We’ve had teachers lose spouses,” says William C. Harrison, superintendent of the Cumberland County Schools, which includes Baldwin Elementary. “We’ve had -- thank God, not many -- students lose parents.”
The stresses have intensified in recent years as the military, stretched thin from the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has had to send combat troops back to the war zones multiple times. Downtime has been shortened and deployments extended to as long as 15 months. That can be especially tough for families with school-age children.
“Some people miss two Christmases -- that’s very hard,” says Shannon Shurko, a former science teacher who recently assumed the new position of Military Child Support Liaison for the Cumberland County Schools.
Trauma and resilience
There are 700,000 children in the United States with at least one parent serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other military bases around the world -- nearly 40 percent of the 1.8 million military children. According to a July 2007 report coauthored by Stephen Cozza, an expert on the mental health of military children and their families, it is estimated that more than 2,500 children have lost a parent in the Iraq war alone, and nearly 20,000 have had parents injured.
Despite these numbers, Cozza cautions against assuming that military children are uniformly traumatized by the increased stress. Many are extremely resilient, he says, and may even be made stronger by the challenges they face. “To assume either widespread trauma or uniform resilience is harmful to our efforts as concerned professionals,” wrote Cozza and coauthor Alicia F. Lieberman, of the University of California, San Francisco. “The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes.”
Stress is not the same as psychological trauma, the authors note; it is something we all experience in varying degrees. However, the stress level among military families in this period of extended conflict is substantial.
Last October, Army Secretary Pete Geren alluded to this stress when he said the Army’s well-regarded system of family supports could have trouble keeping up with demand.
“For 500,000 spouses and 700,000 children, six years of war is uncharted territory,” Geren told a meeting of the Association of the United States Army. “Our family systems … did not contemplate the operational tempo our families are experiencing today.”
The front lines
Alison Sakimura is on the front lines of those family support systems. The wife of an infantry officer who was in charge of 130 soldiers in Iraq, she feels a responsibility to the “Family Readiness Group” back home. She has a time-consuming volunteer job sending e-mails to its members -- parents of soldiers, other relatives, fiancées, and 60 spouses -- with information and messages of support.
“We’ve been in the military for 12 years,” she says, using the plural pronoun to describe a commitment that extends to her entire family.
The e-mails let families know about impending deployments, tell them of family-related events on the base, and offer support while they wait for their spouses and loved ones to come home.
When her husband would call from Iraq, he would tell her little more than, “It’s hot. It’s busy.”
“I already know it’s hot. I already know it’s busy,” she recalls telling him. “Will you tell me something else?”
But actually, she didn’t want to know too much more, and he was more interested in hearing news from her, things like how the children were doing in school and who got an A on a test.
Kimberly Nieto, a social studies teacher at a Cumberland County middle school, said it helped to keep her children busy and maintain family routines while her husband was deployed in Iraq for 12 months (his second deployment). Counselors at her now-6- and 7-year-old daughters’ elementary school regularly checked on them and the children of other deployed parents.
“That was definitely helpful,” Nieto says.
It also helped that her husband, a technical inspector for helicopters, didn’t have to travel much during most of his tour and could talk to the family most nights via Internet and Webcam.
The day he came home to Fort Bragg and strode down the “Green Ramp” that has become a symbol of joy to military families, her daughters got excited, and that made now-3-year-old Alexander excited as well -- and anxious to meet the parent he’d known only from the Webcam.
‘Their only memory is war’
Adrianne Hakes remembers growing up during World War II and the air raid drills that enveloped her hometown of Studio City, Calif. She remembers the darkened windows and the streetlights that gave off a muted yellow glow instead of the bright white light of today. Back then, everyone knew there was a war going on, and everyone was involved. But not now.
“I can go through my daily activities and not give a thought to it,” says Hakes, a school board member for the Oceanside Unified School District near the Marine Base at Camp Pendleton. “But for our military families, this is a reality every day of their lives.”
Three of Oceanside’s elementary schools are located on Camp Pendleton, and the school board has been studying ways to ease transitions for the typically mobile military child. “Just being a military child is stressful,” Hakes says, “but having the war is more.”
She said deployment is a three-part process, each with its own stressors. There is the anxiety of waiting for the family member to be deployed, the adjustment to life during the parent’s absence, and another adjustment when he or she returns. A lot can happen to a family over 12 or 15 months. Children change, take on new responsibilities, and may not relate to their parents as they did when they were younger. This can be stressful and confusing for both the returning parent and the rest of the family.
School can be a place of comfort during wartime. Hakes described a first-grade class in which the teacher read the book A Long, Long Time about a parent in the military. Children who thought they were alone realized there were other classmates going through the same thing.
“They each thought they were by themselves,” Hakes says. “It was a very poignant moment for the children.”
She adds: “There are children in school who were 2 when this war started. Their only memory is war. They don’t know anything but war.”
‘I hope my dad doesn’t die in Iraq’
At Santa Margarita School on Camp Pendleton, 100 percent of the students are children of active duty military personnel, some in the Navy, but most in the Marines. Principal Pat Kurtz says the atmosphere is different than at other schools.
“Just the stress. The stress is just enormous,” Kurtz says. “The children really are emotional. And, as anyone would be when there’s this kind of stress, they sometimes lose it.”
At the same time, Kurtz says she’s “always in awe that they handle the stress as well as they do.” There are no more discipline problems at Santa Margarita than at most schools, and the students are close to one another. When teachers and administrators do have to discipline students, they try to do so with reason and compassion.
There are many activities to do during lunch and recess. A Japanese club meets in one room (many children’s families had been based in Okinawa). There’s a Chess Club and a Spirit Club and just quiet spaces to be alone and read. In one class students gather to play LEGOs while the teacher does prep work. (“He’s got the mother lode of LEGOs,” Kurtz says.)
Kurtz and her staff see their work as a calling and their school as a sanctuary for military children. “As I see it,” she says, “we can provide our little piece of patriotism, contribute something to make the families’ lives a little better.”
Chris Woodard teaches first grade at Santa Margarita. She says the stress level is higher than at the schools “in town.” Children sometimes have trouble paying attention, following directions, and getting along with one another.
“‘I hope my dad doesn’t die in Iraq’ -- this is something my kids write in their journals,” Woodard says.
And yet, she adds, “I’m just amazed that in my class my children operate at or above grade level, which is just, I think, a sign of their resilience.”
The children are very interested in geography and want to know just where their parents are deployed. On one wall is a large chart that reads: “I’m a Military Child. My Military Parent is ….” The children put sticky tabs on the places, around the world, where they are stationed.
“We’re Marines,” Woodard says, “so we’re based on ships, or headed toward Iraq, or training here.” Of her 18 students, nine have a parent who is either on a ship headed toward Iraq, or in Iraq. “That’s half my class. It’s coming and going time here at Camp Pendleton. We’re in transition.”
Even on the base, the children are reminded of the conflicts, Kurtz says. They see helicopter flyovers and hear gunfire from the shooting range.
“We’re very much children of the wars.”
Lawrence Hardy (lhardy@nsba.org) is a senior editor of American School Board Journal.
Preparing and supporting military children are critical
Maybe they develop attention problems, and their grades slip. Or maybe they don’t show any signs at all that they are among the “suddenly military” children.
These are children of reservists and National Guard troops whose parents have been sent overseas, says Larry W. Moehnke, chief of staff of the Military Child Education Coalition in Harker Heights, Texas. Moehnke says more than 480,000 children between the ages of 5 and 18 have parents in these service branches, but the coalition has no estimate of the number of these whose parents are deployed.
For schools on or near military bases, the needs of military children are well-known. That may not be the case with children of National Guard members and reservists, who are spread out in school districts across the country. Indeed, some districts may not even know they have children whose parents are deployed, and, even if they do, they may not know how to help them.
The coalition sponsors professional development institutes for school counselors and special education teachers who serve military children. A special institute also trains educators in how to support children with parents in the National Guard and reserves who have been deployed.
“Basically, it’s a matter of schools trying to open the lines of communication -- letting parents know the schools are supportive and will do what they can to ease anxieties during this period of time,” Moehnke says.
An online booklet, How to Prepare Our Children and Stay Involved in Their Education During Deployment, is also available for parents and educators (See www.militarychild.org).