SC leaders, wife of VA chief meet on military kids

COLUMBIA — South Carolina has made progress helping the children of military families during the past 10 years the nation has been at war, but more can be done, the wife of the head of the Veterans Affairs Administration said Thursday.

"We are trying to build awareness among citizens to reach out and offer support for military-connected children," said Patty Shinseki, an Army spouse for 38 years whose husband Eric once served as the Army's top general and now heads the VA.

Shinseki said military children often need assistance and understanding given parents' deployments and frequent moves. On average, the children of active duty service members may change schools six to nine times before their high school graduation.

"A child who was in first grade on Sept. 11, 2001, and has had a parent in the military, has been on a war footing for the past 10 years, practically their whole life," she said.

A pediatrician treating a child for an upset stomach might want to ask if a family member is deployed; school counselors and principals should be aware if a student has changed schools many times and class requirements are different, or if a child is constantly worried about a deployed parent's safety and needs counseling, she said.

Shinseki, 69, came to South Carolina to meet with about 100 community leaders from across the state at a session hosted by Barbara Livingston, the wife of South Carolina's Adjutant General, Maj. Gen. Robert Livingston. The two-day program was aimed at helping communities identify and provide services to military children.

"The military family doesn't wear a uniform, or a patch to identify them, but they serve, too, in a way that people might not understand," said Livingston, 54. "We want to push out and make sure people can get the help they need."

With eight military bases, about 12,000 members in the South Carolina National Guard and nearly 40,000 active duty military members in the state, Shinseki said her organization can help train people to assist military families, but more can be done such as getting training for teachers, school counselors and other "first responders," she said.

For example, South Carolina is the only state with a formal data collection process in the school system for counting the number of children with active duty or deployed military parents. They also count whether a child's parent has been killed in action, said Mark Bounds, a deputy superintendent in the South Carolina Department of Education, who attended the session and has worked on the data process.

"Issues for military children remain invisible, unless we talk about them," Bounds said.

Gathering such basic information will help determine whether students have specific educational needs, he said. The school system updated its data collection system last year, so a military-related question was easy to add, said Bounds, who said he was sensitive to the issue, having retired from the Army after 20 years.

Bounds said there are at least 41,000 children in the South Carolina public schools with a parent on active duty. Those who are in private schools or home-schooled aren't included that number, he noted.

Shinseki said the Department of Defense estimates that there are almost 2 million children with a parent on active duty, National Guard or Reserve military duty.

She travels the country working with the national nonprofit Military Child Education Coalition, which aims to support military children, and Livingston helped organize the South Carolina meeting with representatives of the group.

She said she has attended similar sessions in 14 states and is headed to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Kansas in the coming weeks.

Mary Keller, the president and CEO of the Coalition, said the nonprofit organization is supported by the Department of Defense, but relies on support from local communities and many volunteers.

"We like to say this organization is parents helping other parents," Keller said.

www.MilitaryChild.org