Schools look to smooth transitions for military families

Children in military families have always had a difficult time integrating into a new school as they move from education system to education system. Just a few of the seemingly endless horror stories:

• Seniors who can't graduate from a school in a new state because their education didn't include lessons in the state's history.

• Students who are denied participation in sports or other activities because they missed summer practice, tryouts or signups.

• Children who were attending kindergarten or first grade in another state but are too young to attend under their new state's guidelines.

• Students who have special needs in one state but are denied access to similar classes in other states until lengthy assessments are made.

A lot of families in the Pikes Peak region are all too familiar with these problems: About 80 percent of the state's 18,422 military children reside in El Paso County, and on average, they'll be in six to nine school systems from kindergarten to 12th grade.

But help is coming in the form of a new interstate compact to make transitions easier when students move between participating states. The Council of State Governments and the U.S. Department of Defense began working to create the Interstate Compact on Educational Opportunity for Military Children two years ago, and legislatures in 11 states - including Colorado - have signed up, with 10 more planning to join.

Cheryl Walker, superintendent at Fountain-Fort Carson School District 8, was chosen a few weeks ago to serve as the compact's commissioner.

"We hope to give military kids a lot more support in transfers and also take away the education obstacles of families in transition," said Walker, who will stay on as D-8's superintendent.

One goal is to make students' lives easier.

"We really need to lessen the burden that military students carry. Our military kids have enough stress. Their parents are fighting a war, and sometimes both are deployed," said Jim Calhoun, principal at Fountain-Fort Carson High School, where about half of the 1,500 students are from military families.

Calhoun has seen plenty of instances in which children were caught in the middle of regulations that differed from one state to another.

He cites the example of a student who moved to Colorado Springs in the middle of her senior year a couple of years ago after her father was deployed.

She did not meet Colorado's requirements for graduation and would have had to go extra semesters to finish, but she'd already been accepted to college. He tried to get officials from her school in the Midwest to allow her to graduate, but they refused.

"What we did is let her graduate here anyway with the credits she would have needed there," Calhoun said.

The compact is expected to resolve such problems, as well as snags over records and enrollment, placement, eligibility for extracurricular and special needs students, and kindergarten age requirements.

The National Military Family Association in Alexandria, Va., has been advocating for all states to join, even those with small numbers of military personnel.

"No matter how supportive a state is, they can only control what's within their borders," said Candace Wheeler, the association's deputy director of government relations. "The compact will assure a more uniform approach to relieve burdens placed on families."