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Military Family Resource Center gives transient families respite

Jesse Hollett
Posted 4/26/17

ORANGE PARK – Tina Baker has been there.

She knows the toll being a military parent can have on children with the constant moving and deployment, loneliness and frenzy of finding new schools …

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Military Family Resource Center gives transient families respite


Posted

ORANGE PARK – Tina Baker has been there.

She knows the toll being a military parent can have on children with the constant moving and deployment, loneliness and frenzy of finding new schools – a new life.

Baker, now the Clay County School District’s military student project specialist, will work at a new Clay County office that serves as a one-stop-shop for the academic, emotional and mental needs of both parents and students with military connections.

Administrators held a ribbon cutting ceremony last Thursday on the new facility, which was previously an underused building adjacent to Orange Park High’s main office buildings.

Both academic and mental health counselors will be on staff to help newly-relocated military families settle in locally. Counselors essentially have two weeks to help give newly settled families all the knowledge and resources they need.

That support is something Baker, a 23-year navy veteran, never had when she came to Clay County.

“My husband was killed on active duty during an aircraft mishap in ’97, and I had two small children at that time,” Baker said. “We did not have this [support], I had to go through hospice to get grief counseling – there was nothing in place for military children in Clay County.”

Things have changed.

Since the war in Afghanistan began and military casualties mounted, the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity began to award grants to school districts that have schools with more than 15 percent military-connected children.

Clay County meets, and in some cases, exceeds that stipulation by up to 10 percent in some schools.

All the while, DoDEA advocated for the adoption of resource centers for the transient families left behind when an officer is deployed or moved from station to station.

“There’s parents out there that are just shell shocked because it’s not uncommon for them to move after six months,” Baker said.

In 2011, the Clay County School District began to use these grants to provide resources for military-connected families for their children out of a small office in Green Cove Springs. Now, Baker works out of an office in a main thoroughfare in a centralized location, so the office is easier to find and easier to operate out of.

They’re “navigating through all these different school systems, and we realize that and just want everything to go smoothly for them,” Baker said. “It’s about connecting them to their schools, connecting them to their peers within two weeks.”

The facility doubles as a robotics and STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – playground for current and new students coming to the district.

The hope is that while parents learn what to do next to get themselves setup in the school district, and in their new location, that children will go and work with current students on robotics, thereby providing a pathway for the new children to make new friends. The county has also used DoDEA dollars to fund its robotics programs in recent years.

“We put the socio-emotional needs in with the academic needs and we find that by finding programs that could address both of those things, we were handling transition issues and struggles just from the dynamics of moving,” said Kathleen Schofield, former county STEM supervisor, who originally helped start the DoDEA grant application process.

“We wanted them to be able to interact with kids who were well-grounded in the community and welcome them in, so we figured robotics was good because it gives them academics and social emotional” support.

Before schools began to shift to realizing that military deployment contributed to result in discipline problems and tardiness in school, teachers did not ask or know that students may have a family member on deployment.

With awareness has come understanding on the situation military-connected families can be facing. The military resource center at Orange Park High is just another front combatting the issue.

“Now they know to ask these questions,” Baker said.