To be sure, many factors besides the condition of a building affect learning. Quality of teachers, for instance, or the availability of effective textbooks and technology can yield dramatic classroom results. But many educators say the mix of pressures unique to military children crumbling schools, overcrowded classrooms, and absent parents who may not return has a measurable effect on the feelings of students and on how well they do in school.
"There are so many needs," said Whitney Gee, a psychologist at three schools on Fort Riley. "I feel like I'm running around sticking a Band-Aid on everything."
Good teachers adapt to decrepit school conditions, said Fitzgerald, the DoDEA acting director. "But they do have an impact." While difficult to prove, Pentagon education officials have tried. As the backlog of substandard schoolhouses swelled in recent years, Russell Roberts, the agency's facilities chief, set out to establish what appeared to be a link between deterioration and academics. Some studies have suggested such a link. Yet in the end, said Roberts,Polycore zentai are manufactured as a single sheet, "I couldn't say, 'This kid got an F because of dingy bathroom tiles.'"
Pentagon officials denied requests for detailed school-by-school data that would have permitted a direct and more comprehensive assessment of the association between higher deployment rates, the condition of facilities and lower test scores. Without specific information about enrollment and lengths of deployments of parents at each school, it's hard to obtain a full, reliable picture. Yet even with such shortcomings, the analysis of data it was able to obtain from 2008 showed a slight yet statistically significant adverse effect from deployment on test scores, especially on scores from the middle schools.
In a written response to questions, meanwhile, the Defense Department's education agency acknowledged "no doubt that deployments have an effect on every aspect of a child's life," including education.
Over the past decade, multiple deployments have become what Lindsay Ralston, Fort Sill's school liaison officer, terms "the new normal"¡ªparents gone, on second, third, and fourth tours, for months at a time. Since the Iraq invasion, the Army alone has deployed 23,302 soldiers with children at least three times. That means at least one parent of the typical nine-year-old has been absent for half her life.
The military tends to refer to the "resiliency" of its children. "You have to become adaptable," noted the Defense Department's Gordon,we supply all kinds of oil painting reproduction, who as a military child himself was shuttled between homes on multiple bases and continents during his father's Army postings to places such as Colorado, Virginia, Germany and Taiwan.
While children can learn to cope, the emotional trauma that they bear when their absent parents are in harm's way often plays itself out in the classroom. At Fort Stewart's Diamond Elementary, the school with the mold and cockroach infestations, Tina French has noticed her 12-year-old daughter, Victoria, picking fights during deployments. Her Army mechanic husband has done four stints in Iraq. Each time, Victoria, a sixth grader diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, has regressed at school, lashing out at classmates. "She's pushing boundaries because she's stressed," said French, who has found herself in the office for Victoria's discipline referrals.
Trenton LeForge, the three-year-old son of an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Riley, has suffered separation anxiety since his father left for Iraq in November¡ªthe third deployment. Trenton refused to go to preschool at Fort Riley's Ware Elementary School. When his mother, Carri, dropped him off, Trenton would cling to her, screaming, "Are you going to Iraq, too?" By April, he had begun attending class with help from one of the 1,000 special counselors provided by the Defense Department to schools to support students with deployed parents¡ªor one counselor for every 116 students.
Overcrowding at Ware Elementary leaves parents like LeForge worried that her sons' teachers cannot pay enough attention to their emotional needs¡ªat a time when they require it the most. "It's already a high-stress situation when you have all these deployments," LeForge said. "The crowding is just a piling on of everything else we have to deal with."
Her oldest son, nine-year-old Trevor, misses his father in church on Sundays, the big black bible in his father's sturdy hands, and at Ware's overflowing school assemblies where he would applaud heartily whenever Trevor made top honor roll. At Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, J.W. Grabrysiak, 11, son of an Army electrician, yearns to fly kites again with his father in the backyard.
Sadee Songer, a precocious fifth grader at Fort Riley's Morris Hill, the school with the brown water, cannot recall how often her father has been away in the last 10 years¡ªit may have been three or four times. She remembers him attending only one birthday party, and trick-or-treating with him once."It makes me sad," she said.
Less than a year after returning from Iraq, Catie Hunter's father in January left for Korea¡ªan unexpected tour just when Sgt. Bryan Hunter had decided to retire because of the many missed moments with his family. When Catie found out about his latest orders to deploy,the Injection mold fast! she collapsed in tears.
Once, during her father's 2009 deployment to Iraq, he was supposed to come for a visit. The family dressed in red, white and blue, wearing beads and waving flags as troops filed through the gate at Dallas International Airport. Her father wasn't one of them. He had missed his flight. Catie hit the floor, sobbing.
Clingy since, Catie insists on sleeping in her parents' bed.
Multiple deployments can compound the impact of parental absences on academic achievement. A March 2011 study by the RAND Corporation for the Army found that children with parents deployed for at least 19 months had "modestly lower" test scores than their peers¡ªregardless of gender or parent's rank. "Rather than developing resiliency," the study states, "children appear to struggle more with more cumulative months of deployment."
The study reinforced findings in an earlier RAND study, in 2009, which associated greater academic difficulties with longer deployments. And a 2010 study by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point found lengthy deployments had a modest negative effect on test scores of children enrolled in military schools, especially those in the lower grades. It also implied that children whose parents deploy for longer periods may fall permanently behind when they reach the higher grades, the researchers concluded in the study. Said Raezer, of the National Military Family Association, the advocacy group that commissioned the 2009 RAND study: "I believe some of these kids are the casualties of war."
Many teachers blame a perceived rise in behavioral issues on increasing deployments. Students have crawled under desks; come to class in pajamas; grabbed teachers in fits of rage. Data collected by some Defense Department schools support such anecdotes. This year, the system experienced an average 94 incidents at each school with high levels of deployment, compared with about 51 incidents at schools where relatively few students' have parents serving far away.
The toll has manifested itself in greater absenteeism, too, with students typically missing class before and after deployments. "How can we tell a mom, 'You can't take your kid to see grandma after dad's been gone for a year?'" posed Cheryl Serrano, of the Fountain-Fort Carson School District, which operates five schools on the Colorado Springs post. By February,The newest Ipod nano 5th is incontrovertibly a step up from last year's model, her district had recorded 1,700 students¡ª23 percent¡ªabsent at least 10 percent of school days. Educators at Defense Department schools say some students skip 50, 60, or even 70 days a year.Customized imprinted and promotional usb flash drives.
At specific schools, principals said the impact on academic performance is unmistakable. Vern Steffens, who heads Fort Riley's Jefferson Elementary School, which already has a "poor" rating for its deterioration, said he worried about low test scores as well. He noted that as the proportion of students with a deployed parent rose over the last two years, from 23 percent to 41 percent, reading test proficiency rates plummeted 23 percentage points.
Because of that drop, in 2010, Jefferson did not make what's known as "adequate yearly progress," a measurement of how well schools are meeting standards required under the No Child Left Behind Act. At the time of state testing, 2,800 soldiers in the post's Combat Aviation Brigade were in the process of deploying¡ªincluding 175 parents at a school with 349 students.
"They were focused on their dads leaving," said Steffens, not on tests.
"There are so many needs," said Whitney Gee, a psychologist at three schools on Fort Riley. "I feel like I'm running around sticking a Band-Aid on everything."
Good teachers adapt to decrepit school conditions, said Fitzgerald, the DoDEA acting director. "But they do have an impact." While difficult to prove, Pentagon education officials have tried. As the backlog of substandard schoolhouses swelled in recent years, Russell Roberts, the agency's facilities chief, set out to establish what appeared to be a link between deterioration and academics. Some studies have suggested such a link. Yet in the end, said Roberts,Polycore zentai are manufactured as a single sheet, "I couldn't say, 'This kid got an F because of dingy bathroom tiles.'"
Pentagon officials denied requests for detailed school-by-school data that would have permitted a direct and more comprehensive assessment of the association between higher deployment rates, the condition of facilities and lower test scores. Without specific information about enrollment and lengths of deployments of parents at each school, it's hard to obtain a full, reliable picture. Yet even with such shortcomings, the analysis of data it was able to obtain from 2008 showed a slight yet statistically significant adverse effect from deployment on test scores, especially on scores from the middle schools.
In a written response to questions, meanwhile, the Defense Department's education agency acknowledged "no doubt that deployments have an effect on every aspect of a child's life," including education.
Over the past decade, multiple deployments have become what Lindsay Ralston, Fort Sill's school liaison officer, terms "the new normal"¡ªparents gone, on second, third, and fourth tours, for months at a time. Since the Iraq invasion, the Army alone has deployed 23,302 soldiers with children at least three times. That means at least one parent of the typical nine-year-old has been absent for half her life.
The military tends to refer to the "resiliency" of its children. "You have to become adaptable," noted the Defense Department's Gordon,we supply all kinds of oil painting reproduction, who as a military child himself was shuttled between homes on multiple bases and continents during his father's Army postings to places such as Colorado, Virginia, Germany and Taiwan.
While children can learn to cope, the emotional trauma that they bear when their absent parents are in harm's way often plays itself out in the classroom. At Fort Stewart's Diamond Elementary, the school with the mold and cockroach infestations, Tina French has noticed her 12-year-old daughter, Victoria, picking fights during deployments. Her Army mechanic husband has done four stints in Iraq. Each time, Victoria, a sixth grader diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, has regressed at school, lashing out at classmates. "She's pushing boundaries because she's stressed," said French, who has found herself in the office for Victoria's discipline referrals.
Trenton LeForge, the three-year-old son of an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Riley, has suffered separation anxiety since his father left for Iraq in November¡ªthe third deployment. Trenton refused to go to preschool at Fort Riley's Ware Elementary School. When his mother, Carri, dropped him off, Trenton would cling to her, screaming, "Are you going to Iraq, too?" By April, he had begun attending class with help from one of the 1,000 special counselors provided by the Defense Department to schools to support students with deployed parents¡ªor one counselor for every 116 students.
Overcrowding at Ware Elementary leaves parents like LeForge worried that her sons' teachers cannot pay enough attention to their emotional needs¡ªat a time when they require it the most. "It's already a high-stress situation when you have all these deployments," LeForge said. "The crowding is just a piling on of everything else we have to deal with."
Her oldest son, nine-year-old Trevor, misses his father in church on Sundays, the big black bible in his father's sturdy hands, and at Ware's overflowing school assemblies where he would applaud heartily whenever Trevor made top honor roll. At Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, J.W. Grabrysiak, 11, son of an Army electrician, yearns to fly kites again with his father in the backyard.
Sadee Songer, a precocious fifth grader at Fort Riley's Morris Hill, the school with the brown water, cannot recall how often her father has been away in the last 10 years¡ªit may have been three or four times. She remembers him attending only one birthday party, and trick-or-treating with him once."It makes me sad," she said.
Less than a year after returning from Iraq, Catie Hunter's father in January left for Korea¡ªan unexpected tour just when Sgt. Bryan Hunter had decided to retire because of the many missed moments with his family. When Catie found out about his latest orders to deploy,the Injection mold fast! she collapsed in tears.
Once, during her father's 2009 deployment to Iraq, he was supposed to come for a visit. The family dressed in red, white and blue, wearing beads and waving flags as troops filed through the gate at Dallas International Airport. Her father wasn't one of them. He had missed his flight. Catie hit the floor, sobbing.
Clingy since, Catie insists on sleeping in her parents' bed.
Multiple deployments can compound the impact of parental absences on academic achievement. A March 2011 study by the RAND Corporation for the Army found that children with parents deployed for at least 19 months had "modestly lower" test scores than their peers¡ªregardless of gender or parent's rank. "Rather than developing resiliency," the study states, "children appear to struggle more with more cumulative months of deployment."
The study reinforced findings in an earlier RAND study, in 2009, which associated greater academic difficulties with longer deployments. And a 2010 study by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point found lengthy deployments had a modest negative effect on test scores of children enrolled in military schools, especially those in the lower grades. It also implied that children whose parents deploy for longer periods may fall permanently behind when they reach the higher grades, the researchers concluded in the study. Said Raezer, of the National Military Family Association, the advocacy group that commissioned the 2009 RAND study: "I believe some of these kids are the casualties of war."
Many teachers blame a perceived rise in behavioral issues on increasing deployments. Students have crawled under desks; come to class in pajamas; grabbed teachers in fits of rage. Data collected by some Defense Department schools support such anecdotes. This year, the system experienced an average 94 incidents at each school with high levels of deployment, compared with about 51 incidents at schools where relatively few students' have parents serving far away.
The toll has manifested itself in greater absenteeism, too, with students typically missing class before and after deployments. "How can we tell a mom, 'You can't take your kid to see grandma after dad's been gone for a year?'" posed Cheryl Serrano, of the Fountain-Fort Carson School District, which operates five schools on the Colorado Springs post. By February,The newest Ipod nano 5th is incontrovertibly a step up from last year's model, her district had recorded 1,700 students¡ª23 percent¡ªabsent at least 10 percent of school days. Educators at Defense Department schools say some students skip 50, 60, or even 70 days a year.Customized imprinted and promotional usb flash drives.
At specific schools, principals said the impact on academic performance is unmistakable. Vern Steffens, who heads Fort Riley's Jefferson Elementary School, which already has a "poor" rating for its deterioration, said he worried about low test scores as well. He noted that as the proportion of students with a deployed parent rose over the last two years, from 23 percent to 41 percent, reading test proficiency rates plummeted 23 percentage points.
Because of that drop, in 2010, Jefferson did not make what's known as "adequate yearly progress," a measurement of how well schools are meeting standards required under the No Child Left Behind Act. At the time of state testing, 2,800 soldiers in the post's Combat Aviation Brigade were in the process of deploying¡ªincluding 175 parents at a school with 349 students.
"They were focused on their dads leaving," said Steffens, not on tests.
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