School system helps Pacific students cope with stresses of military life
By Fred Knapp, Stars and
Stripes
Miller |
ATSUGI NAVAL AIR FACILITY, Japan — The letter from Austin, a
student at Shirley Lanham Elementary School here, says a lot in a few words.
“Dear Friend,” he writes in a booklet of letters designed
to welcome new students to Japan. “Japan is a beautiful place to live. When I first
came here, I was very bored. Since I was always bored, I just took a nap. Three months
later after I moved in, I only had one friend. My house was very empty. Now I have a lot
of friends. It just takes some time.”
Boredom, depression, anger and behavioral problems often are seen in
young people on overseas military communities. But the distinct confluence of
circumstances can pose special challenges for children in Defense Department schools.
“Based on the difficulties that frequent transfers pose on the
children, you might expect their performance to be below par,” Army Gen. Henry
Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month, according to the American
Forces Press Service. “To the contrary, the performance of our children has been
outstanding.”
Tribe |
Shelton cited a Wall Street Journal finding that 80 percent of
Defense Department school graduates go on to college, compared with a national average of
67 percent.
Still, as another school year begins, counselors and others who work
with students and families are prepared to deal with the negatives as well as the
positives.
There are the frequent moves — the average military family moves
nine times over a 20-year career, Charles Abell, assistant secretary of defense for force
management policy, said in a recent American Forces Press Service report.
There also are times when a parent is away for months at a time on
deployments. There are the stresses as well as the opportunities that come with living
overseas. And there are the advantages and disadvantages of living in a close-knit,
structured community.
The moving process can start as soon as a child finds out he or she
is moving, or when he or she arrives at the new location, says Hermelinda Miller, youth
outreach coordinator at Atsugi’s Fleet and Family Support Center.
Davis |
“We focus mainly on their feelings,” Miller says. “The
average feeling is shock at first, and then we hear they’re angry.”
Acknowledging the difficulty of leaving old friends and routines,
“I reinforce to them that all of these feelings are quite normal,” Miller says.
While Miller helps the children deal with their feelings, relocation
specialist Ginger Davis works with parents, encouraging them to include children in making
decisions, such as what to take on the plane or what to ship.
“There’s just a tremendous amount of stress involved with
the whole family,” Davis says, adding that it can be reduced if parents say:
“‘What would you like to take?’ instead of just dictating:
‘Here’s what you’re going to do.’”
It’s not just moving that puts a strain on students and their
parents. Atsugi is the home of Carrier Air Wing FIVE, whose members are put out to sea
with the USS Kitty Hawk, often leaving spouses and children behind for months at a time.
Tollefson |
“Shortly after they get back to school and back into a routine,
Boom! There goes the deployment,” with the potential for more stress and depression,
Davis says.
School counselors dealing with such situations often refer students
and families to Fleet & Family Support, she says.
Miller says some children will rebel against the parent who stays
home.
To help deal with that, the Fleet & Family Support Center offers
family counseling. Counseling is not some “magical, mystical” process, says the
center’s director, Ray Tribe. Rather, it is a place where exchanges that might take
seconds in ordinary conversation can be slowed down to a point where people can hear each
other.
“Kids and parents do want to be happy. They do not want to be
fighting and squabbling the whole time,” Tribe said.
Still, if a spouse who does not deploy works outside the home,
deployments can force students into parental roles, such as taking care of younger
siblings, cooking, cleaning and shopping.
That can cause resentment that children may show by behaviors such as
drinking or shoplifting, says Joseph Tollefson, team leader for clinical services at the
center.
But when such problems crop up, Tollefson says, the close-knit nature
of overseas military communities is an advantage.
In the United States, such matters would be handled by a juvenile
court, and “that’s not necessarily a rehabilitative experience,” he says.
In a case of students caught shoplifting, “I don’t think
they would talk to them [and ask]: ‘Has your father been deployed?’” he
says.
But at Atsugi, Tribe says, “When something happens, it
doesn’t happen anonymously to some kid who goes off to juvenile court.”
Instead, Miller says, kids who get in trouble on or off the base can
be placed in a community service program. When it started in 1996, the program involved
picking up trash, but now it includes other activities such as shelving books at the
library, as well as education in everything from self-esteem to career planning.
“It’s not looked at as punishment, but as
preventative,” she says.
Tribe acknowledges that, ultimately, “If there isn’t a
change of behavior, the kids just get shipped back home, so there is a little
authority” from the command backing up the community service approach.
Obviously, for most DODDS students, things never reach that point,
regardless of the pressures on them.
Still, those pressures are real. Tribe notes they range from simply
not being able to drive to a mall and buy the latest CD, to kids who have grown up living
off-base in the United States being “smacked in the face by the military
culture” for the first time.
However, he and his co-workers at the center say, that close-knit,
structured culture pays off in terms of attention being paid so that children don’t
“fall through the cracks” and get in trouble.
“There’s probably more supervision than they would like,
but that’s an advantage as well,” he says.
Shelton, citing a school superintendent, acknowledges that rules and
bureaucracy sometimes get in the way of helping military children cope with their
environment. But he urges continued efforts to “get it right.”
“At the same time their parents are serving their nation, the
kids are trying to be all they can be and our system should be something that accommodates
them,” he says.
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