Finding Their Voices

It is a joyous morning indeed.  In my e-mail this morning was a link to a fabulous program for military children.  It’s called A Backpack Journalist, and its goal is to help military youth find their voice as writers in all media--journalism, songwriting, fiction, even coloring for the younger ones.  

A Backpack Journalist is an educational services and event support company that provides curriculum, workshops and special events for military children ages 6-11 and 12-18, to help them through the deployment and reintegration cycle. Here’s a link to a short video about the program, featuring some young children participating in group activities and talking about their parents’ deployment.

According to its founder, Linda Dennis, A Backpack Journalist “is a combination of processes that help military youth find their voice and learn to express themselves through journalistic writing, song writing and photojournalism using the latest, greatest technology tools around.

“Our team consists of journalism teachers from high school and college, yearbook advisers and photographers in the business,  military family volunteers and facilitators, song writers and performing artists and creative people who have come together with a love of working with youth and a wish to help youth ‘find their voice in their chosen creative way!’”

  

The group sponsors events directly but perhaps more importantly, it creates units of curriculum that others can use in their communities.Curriculum is offered in an open classroom with a mobile lab-based learning environment.

The curriculum combines:

• basics of  journalistic writing, photography, song writing,  film making, broadcasting, cartooning, poetry and journaling 
• experienced teachers and professionals focusing on hands-on and one-on-one activities with participants.
• use of point-and-shoot cameras, flip video and pocket recorders, multimedia software, and PC’s and MAC’s 

A Backpack Journalist  Curriculum Guide  is available for license.  It contains each subject track and operational how-to’s for those interested in setting up such a program in their communities. The guide includes a syllabus for each of the following:

• Journalistic Writing
• Photojournalism
• Song Writing
• Poetry
• Editorial Cartooning
• Film making – Script writing to Broadcast
• Shoebox Journaling
• Digital publishing

Linda Dennis, you are a hero!   For more information, go to either of these links.

info@abackpackjournalist.com  Ldennis@abackpackjournalist.com 

         

Watching Out for the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

More than 524,000 soldiers with children have deployed in support of the war effort in the Army alone.  As of June 30, 142,000 Army children were dealing with the absence of a deployed parent.How are they doing?

 I wrote yesterday about the findings in an upcoming Rand Corporation study that demonstrate the negative effects of lengthy, repeated deployments on the education of military children. At the conference where these findings were shared, Amy Richardson of the Rand Corporation offered a number of ideas about what could be done to help.  Most of the suggestions are not new, but reinforce what we have already intuitively known, or been told by previous research. While many of these ideas are good, I had some misgivings, because in trying to help, it's important that we don't inadvertently turn military children into victims of our concern.  

Improve school services. School counselors need better access to information on services that can help Army families. The Army also should increase and improve the activities of school liaison officers and encourage them to foster a more collaborative effort with school administrators.

Improve mental health services.  The Army’s behavioral health care capacity would be improved by increasing pay and other benefits to attract more specialists. Free, community-based mental health care support should be fostered through grant funding or cooperative efforts.Telepsychiatry would offer a valuable resource to Guard and Reserve families in remote locations. The Army already has a pilot program at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Drum, NY to develop this service. 

Improve community services. There should be more regional or statewide social events to minimize social isolation for Guard and Reserve servicemembers and their families.  Also, a social networking site especially for military youth, with instant messaging and chat rooms, would be helpful.

The most obvious and critical need of all, however, is to know who the military children are. Military leaders should create a method to inform schools about which children are military and the status of parental deployment. Ideally, this  information would be fed directly from the Army to the schools. In the alternative, the Rand Corporation suggested that a voluntary form handed out at the start of the year to all school families.

This last gave me pause. Having the information is critical, but the way it is obtained could have a huge effect on the children.  Overt methods, such as the voluntary form, might unleash a self-fulfilling prophesy.  It’s important to be worried about military children’s ability to thrive, but possibly counterproductive to convey the message to the child that we think there’s a reason they might not. 

For every child who appreciates knowing the extra attention will be there, perhaps there is another who decides there’s little point in trying to thrive. We have to be careful that in our good intentions we don’t plant a seed of self doubt or lowered expectations.  Military children don’t want our pity, and they aren’t an alien species.  They’re just children with some added stress in their lives.  We should care equally about all children, but we owe something special to these. We need to find a way to make services feel casual, normal, easily accessible, and, where possible, fun.  Grave faces and worried looks are not good for any child trying to make his or her way in difficult times.

Nineteen Months

We have heard a lot recently about how deployment impacts military children’s academic success, and a new study gives new, concrete information. The Rand Corporation gave attendees of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition an advance look at a recently completed six-year study yesterday in Washington. 

Rand Corp. conducted the study from 2002 to 2008, sampling military children attending public schools in North Carolina and Washington state. They discovered that children whose parents have been deployed for 19 months or more cumulatively had lower school achievement test scores than children whose parents had been deployed for less time or not at all. The impact for children began at the 19-month mark, and the cumulative amount of time was more significant than the number of deployments. No significant variation was found depending on location of the deployment, or the age, gender and rank or status of the parent.  I have written in the past about how, for some reason that isn’t clear, girls tend to have more difficulties than boys, but that was not part of this study. The study also confirms what might be expected, that the more a parent struggles with deployment of the spouse, the more likely the children are to struggle also. 

Amy Richarson, policy analyst for Rand and the speaker at the meeting, said, “We also found that children are facing some behavioral health challenges that can impact their academic success, and for many of the children [resilience] seemed to be waning.”  This is a troublesome development, for the resilience of children is one of the things families most depend upon when facing upheavals and added stress.

But cooperative efforts with schools and an increase in behavioral health resources can have a positive impact, the study found.  I’ll write about that, and about ideas raised at the conference, tomorrow. 

DePLAYment

This is officially the Year of the Air Force Family. Around the country Air Force Bases have mounted activities to strengthen families and make deployments easier to endure. One such initiative, the DePLAYment Program, ended July 31. Over 10,000 families participated in the program of free classes and sports activities for children of deployed military members, and free or discounted family programs for the deployed members' entire family. In Charleston, for example, program activities included the following:

· Ten hours of free child care at the Child Development Center

· Free annual Youth Center membership

· Up to $50 per child forTae Kwon Do or dance classes

· Up to $50 per child in various fee-charging team sports 

· Free family bowling nights

· Free family golf clinics

· Free family arts and crafts activities

· Free bicycle tour of historic Charleston

· Free family canoe trip

· Free family day trip to Darlington Motor Speedway's "Nationwide 200"

In his recent article Happy Homecomings, Lt. Col. (Dr.) Howard Givens, 628th Medical Operations Squadron commander at Joint Base Charleston, has this to say about such activities:

“In my experience, both as a physician and as a military member who has recently deployed, many families do not recognize the significant stress that a deployment will put on each person in a family - including the spouse and each child. Families are already busy with school, sports, and community activities and may plan to continue all their normal activities without considering the additional stressors associated with the deployment.”  

Givens explains that during deployment, “ family members may experience stress related to separation from the military member, changes in responsibilities at home, and changes in recreation because the deployed family member is not available to participate. These stressors may not seem intimidating by themselves, but taken together and over a period of months, they begin to have an effect on the individual - and on the family.”

Deployment affects everyone differently, and families may have widely varying reactions. “Some children will be able to ‘soldier on’ through a deployment with little apparent effect on their physical or psychological health. Other children in the same family may struggle at school or in relationships, have sleep difficulties or even physical illness while trying to cope with the stress of their parent's deployment.” 

Givens is a strong supporter of planning before deployment not just the most obvious necessities, but also the leisure activities that will keep spirits up. Many of the activities of the dePLAYment program are actually available year-round, and it is a good idea to begin working them into children’s lives before the parent’s departure.  How much better it would be to remember doing something with dad or mom, rather than adding even new forms of fun to the many changes children undergo.

Profile: Susan McIntosh, Quantico

Susan McIntosh is spending her career in service to military children. She has spent the last eighteen years at Quantico as an Education Services Officer, and before that she was a teacher in middle and high school. Her current job includes facilitating on-base college programs and tuition assistance.

McIntosh recently was appointed to the Virginia Council on the Virginia Council on the Interstate Compact  on Educational Opportunity for Military Children, where she will serve as military liaison for the voting members of the board. She was chosen from more than 40 other candidates based on her experiences in the field.

I’ve written on efforts like the Council before, which assist children from military families in the transition from one school to another. One of the issues facing the committee is differing graduation requirements from state to state. “It’s typical for children in a military school that they might go to three or four elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools,” McIntosh said in a recent article by Shandra Dyess (who also took this photograph of McIntosh at work). It’s  not just a matter of determining equivalent courses from district to district. Some school districts might require taking courses in a specific order, while another school might require a certain level of performance on standardized tests. In some places, the cut-off age for starting kindergarten is different, creating difficulties for some young students.

McIntosh relishes the opportunity to help students succeed. One wall of her small, neat office is covered with diplomas from students on base who she has helped earn a degree. By her own count, she has helped more than 8,000 of her students, including her own children reach their educational goals.  It’s nice to know there are people like Susan--many of them across the country--who are determined to serve our nation’s military children well.

Dove Song

What does a novelist think makes the perfect gift?  A novel, of course, and with the holiday season coming up, I have been doing sone research on books for children and young adults, focusing on the experiences of military families.  

I haven’t read Kristine Franklin’s Dove Song (Candlewick Press, 1999), but it sounds as if it might be particularly apt for today’s middle schoolers. The main character, eleven-year-old Bobbie Lynn, moves with her mother and brother after he father is deployed to the Vietnam War. Her transition to her new civilian school in Washington State is difficult, but eventually she makes friends with another girl on the margins, Wendy Feeney. Wendy has a severely retarded twin sister, who freaks Bobbie Lynn out at first, and she is puzzled by her new friend's deep belief in guardian angels, and the Feeney’s family unfamiliar Catholic ways.  

Life is better, thought with quirky but fun Wendy as a friend. Then, Bobbie Lynn’s family gets the dreaded news that her father is missing in action. Bobbie Lynn’s mother has always been fragile, but this news sends her spiraling down into depression so profound that Bobbie Lynn and her brother, afraid to reveal their problems to anyone, resort to spoon feeding her to get her to eat. Only when Bobbie Lynn herself becomes ill with pneumonia does she realize that she isn’t alone and doesn’t have to bear the weight of the world on her shoulders by herself.

The seriousness of the mother’s inability to cope with the absence and possible loss of her husband, and the effect this has on her children, make this a difficult book emotionally, but it is uplifting nevertheless for the powerful message it sends about community and friendship.   Franklin has been praised by critics for her convincing portrayal of the late 1960s, especially the national conflict about the Vietnam War,  and the less-than-welcoming treatment of disabilities in the pre-ADA era.  A solid work of YA historical fiction, it won the Minnesota Book Award in 2000.

If you have an independent bookstore near you, please consider buying your books there.  We need neighborhood bookstore to thrive!

Military Kids Unite

Here’s one from San Diego, my home.  Correia Middle School and the Navy School Liaison Officer have set up a new after-school club called Military Kids Unite, to help students in military families cope with deployments, relocations and other stresses of being  in a military family.   Their first meeting, which included “pizza, drinks, and fun,” was held last week. 

Connor Carr is the president of the new club. He started MKU at another local middle school the previous year.  “This year, with the help of Mrs. Pieper [a Correia teacher] and Mrs. Williamson, our Navy School Liaison Officer, we are bringing this club to Correia for the first time,” Connor says. 

Yesterday I wrote about Tamarah Frank, a ninth grader with a desire to use her experiences as a military child to serve others.  Connor Carr is another good example of children stepping up to help themselves and point the way to how the needs of military families can be met.