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students who have less support at home due to the deployment of a parent must be structured anddelivered by school staff. Teachers, principals, counselors and other school staff must collaborate toestablish responsive classroom and school settings to meet the social and emotional needs of studentsstruggling with transition and deployment related stressors, as well as provide additional counselingservices to these students.Many of the educators we interviewed expressed a desire to establishing communications withparents and the military in order to find out as much information as possible about upcoming transitionsand deployments, so they are able to know which students may need which service and when.Educators also described how they struggled with creating and recreating schedules and classarrangements that work in the context of a shifting, difficult-to-predict population of students. Someasked questions about how to assess and track the needs of military connected students in order toinvestigate whether and how programs and service provided are being used.Schools’ ability to address these issues and promote student wellbeing and academic progress isintimately connected to the ways schools do business. Supportive school communities are not likely tobe developed solely through externalized or add-on programs and supports without concomitant changeat the school level. There is therefore a need to build capacity within schools to meet the needs ofmilitary connected students. Although external programs and resources can be beneficial, they requireinternalized structures and supports to be able to take root and become part of the life and institutionalmemory of the school. Furthermore, limited funding availability makes it imperative to empowerschools and school personnel to maximize their own resources to meet the needs of military connectedstudents.Sustainability is possible if capacity is built simultaneously inside-out and outside-in (Bol,Nunnery, & Lowther, 1998). With this in mind, our recommendations for the Department of Defenseand others seeking to enhance school responsiveness to the specific needs of military connected childrenare:1. Provide sustained, comprehensive, job embedded professional development for school staffwho work with military connected students to create the capacity for building school-wideprograms and practices that meet the academic and social-emotional needs of militarystudents and families. The impacts of transition and deployment are realized at the school,classroom and individual levels. Accordingly, staff who work with military connected studentsat all these levels—namely administrators, teachers and other instructional staff, and counselorsand other support service providers—must be aware of and able to address the educational needscreated by transition and deployment. Furthermore, this training must extend beyond the simpleawareness of issues and equip professionals with the methods and tools they need to be able tocreate and implement the academic and social-emotional supports needed by their studentscoping with transition and deployment related issues. Teachers, administrators, counselors andother school staff will be assisted in creating classrooms and schools in which all militaryconnected students can succeed by equipping them with a repertoire of tools, exemplars andmodels they can use in their actual job capacities, time to explore them, assistance withimplementation of these tools, and the construction of customized tools that fit their own localschool contexts. According to the participants in our study, this sort of assistance would likelybe well received and utilized at this time. Over 80% of the teachers we surveyed indicated that itis a priority for them to learn more about the needs of military connected students while only19
11% indicated that they had received special training to address the needs of military connectedstudents.2. Provide support for additional school-based personnel to assist with the academic andsocial emotional challenges of transition and deployment. Additional counselors, smallerstudent to teacher ratios, and additional administrative support all provide ‘boots on the ground’where they are often most needed in schools. Because some of the needs associated withtransitions and deployments are so highly individualized, requiring for example additionalcounseling to cope with stress, or quick turn-around evaluations, or individualized academicremediation, more on-site school staff to implement these specialized services logisticallybecomes a necessity if they are to be offered. Quite often the barrier to meeting the needs ofstudents struggling with transition and deployment issues in our schools was described by ourparticipants as not a “what to do” problem but a “who to do it” problem. Public schools withhigh concentrations of military connected students have unique staffing needs that, if notaddressed, lower the capacity to provide a high quality education for all children, not just thosewhose parents are serving our country.3. Assist schools in establishing systems to identify and respond to changing needs of militaryconnected students, and monitor outcomes. We did not find evidence that schools in ourstudy had formal systems in place to specifically track and monitor the needs and progress ofmilitary connected students as a group, nor to systematically assess and reflect on their schoolwideefforts to provide a military conscious school environment. We recommend that resourcesbe dedicated to helping schools establish and share these systems and tools so they are better ableto build and sustain comprehensive school wide approaches to meet the changing needs of theirmilitary connected students.4. Enhance school-military partnerships and communications. Most of the participants in ourstudy mentioned desiring more information about upcoming transitions and deployments so theyare better able to anticipate needs and target services, as well as more information aboutresources. While our counselor participants made us aware that many resources do exist,connecting them to teachers so they may be utilized in the day to day life of the classroomappears to be an area that requires more attention. Fewer than 25% of teachers we surveyedindicated they had access to a list of resources and services to support the needs of militaryconnected students and fewer than 14% agreed that school staff were well informed aboutmilitary-based support services for military connected students.20
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