Navy Families Come to Grips With the 3 R’s : Schools Help Cushion Blow of Frequent Moves

Hardly a day passes without a moving van parking in the neighborhood of Hancock Elementary School, and a new student showing up at the school’s front door or an old student saying goodby.

The scene is Murphy Canyon Heights, the sprawling Navy housing complex at the southern end of Tierrasanta, home to 10,000 enlisted men’s families and one of the few military housing areas anywhere that is devoid of fencing or security to keep its identity separate from adjoining civilian areas.

In the middle sits Hancock. Though a kindergarten through fifth-grade branch of the San Diego Unified School District, Hancock’s almost 900 students are all dependents of military families.

Additional Challenges

As such, the school--along with a few other San Diego County schools in similar geographic situations--faces challenges beyond the normal problems of learning and discipline common to any educational institution. The stresses of military life, especially the high transiency and frequent absences of the father because of overseas assignment, often affect a child’s ability to cope with school.

Teachers and counselors learn to recognize signs in the classroom that a student is facing emotional turmoil because the family is about to move, or the father is about to go to sea, or return from a six-month or one-year deployment.

According to school officials, the staff at Hancock must work harder than at other schools to persuade parents, who are often young and themselves distracted by financial and other problems, that the school can play an important and positive role in a child’s life, even if only for a year or two before their next move. (At Hancock, 44% of the students are non-white and 36% come from families receiving federal welfare payments.)

The schools carry out a major effort to prevent as many cases as they can of loneliness, of anger and of fear from becoming crises affecting the classroom.

“The needs of children for love, for caring, for strong academic programs, are heightened in our case,” said Hancock Principal David Wright, who has initiated special programs to keep Navy children on an even keel in the face of family stress.

Grueling Demands

“The military demands on a family in general are grueling,” said Greg Armstrong, school psychologist for the Oceanside Unified School District, whose Santa Margarita Elementary School is on the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base.

“The biggest difference is the adjustments that the kids have to make to the temporary absences of the father, and the effects we then see in the schools.”

Hancock counselor Richard Thibodeau added: “The things we have to deal with are often average things (among school problems) except we see them in much larger percentages because there is more separation, more divorce, more disruption of the family nucleus here.”

Some Assistance

School officials say that the military has made strides in its efforts to deal with the special school circumstances of its families. Navy family service centers now hold parenting seminars from time to time at various schools, and Navy counselors are more sensitive to school-related concerns than in the past. The Navy sponsored a conference for school counselors countywide late last year to encourage a stronger partnership.

But the schools still deal with most of the problems.

“A lot of the good intentions of the Navy sometimes get lost in its bureaucracy,” said Jett Keyser, a special counselor at Miller Elementary School, a nearby neighbor of Hancock whose students also are almost all military dependents.

“I think the Navy is more involved, at least compared to before, but I think that too much still has to be done by the school at this point to prepare a family for school problems while (the father) is on deployment,” said Barbara Irish, Hancock’s PTA president and the wife of a career Marine.

On any given day at Hancock, fifth-graders will often be seen guiding around third-graders. That’s all part of the “student center” concept of Principal Wright, who has designated some students as “peer counselors” to take new students around and make them feel at home at Hancock. They also may “buddy up” with other students who may be having a problem or two and need extra attention.

A steady stream of students files through the student center, a spacious, carpeted room well-stocked with games, a computer, a separate cinema, and comfortable chairs and tables. Graduate students in education from the University of San Diego run various “friendship groups,” where students can participate in a learning activity while at the same time making friends among themselves.

Students who have done well in class receive “tickets” to the center, good for a short movie or playtime, and they can bring along a friend as well.

“Children can’t learn unless the environment makes them ready to learn,” Wright said. “We need especially to understand that, at this school . . . we operate kind of like a family for the children and parents. People make the difference and the key in learning is people, not machines.”

Wright sets aside an hour a day for children to come in and talk to him for any reason, from anger over a broken lunch pail handle to despair over a father’s departure.

Armstrong in Oceanside sets aside time for parents to drop in without an appointment, although he wishes more would take advantage of it. Keyser at Miller rotates more than 80% of the students through his counseling center to let them know help is there for the asking whenever they want it.

Wright also has set up at Hancock the school district’s achievement goals program (AGP), originally designed to raise test scores of children in schools identified as minority-isolated under a 1977 court order.

“We needed to upgrade our curriculum quality here,” Wright said, “and counter what was a prevailing attitude that children can’t really learn because they are transient. They can learn.” Test scores at Hancock, as measured by the California Assessment Program, have risen steadily over the last three years.

PTA President Irish said, “The school is warmer, more affectionate (than others) and allows the child to move in slowly and doesn’t just say, ‘This is the way we do it, boom!’ ”

‘Really Nice Kids’

First-grade teacher Rebecca Gaines said: “The kids here can do well if you show them you have compassion . . . We have really nice kids and a lot of the mothers are rock solid, but when the husbands are gone. . . . “

Michele Polley, an instructional aide in special education and a Navy parent who lives in the area, said that the Navy should do much more to help out the schools. She and others would like to see the Navy tell the schools when a large movement of personnel in or out of the area is about to occur, so the schools could prepare. They would like to see all parents briefed about the things the father can do, such as letter-writing about schools, while away on deployment.

“They don’t prepare you very well about schools (at the time of deployment),” Polley said. “Maybe they could have a Big Brother type of program. There simply are things that you can’t handle as a mother, no matter how good you are.” While the Navy now has comprehensive counseling centers, families must drive to either Miramar Naval Air Station or to the 32nd Street Naval Station.

“A lot of wives here, though, are isolated, and can’t or don’t want to leave the area,” Polley said. “A majority have barely had a high school education and feel threatened, and intimidated. There are a lot of health problems, too.”

The Navy has come up with a recreational aide to sponsor sports programs after school, Wright said. The lack of adequate recreation for children has been a longstanding complaint in the area. Although built in 1977 with few windows, Hancock nevertheless has one of the highest vandalism rates among the city’s more than 100 elementary schools, a ranking that officials attribute to children roaming the densely populated area idly after school and during vacations.

In addition, the Navy makes available a computer expert from the Naval Ocean Systems Center on Point Loma to visit Hancock regularly to help students with their computer studies. The Navy also sits on a special attendance monitoring council set up for Hancock and Miller, where officials review excessive absences to identify students who may need counseling or other help.

Thibodeau said he would like to see school officials present at Navy briefings about the area for parents. “After all, the kids are here for six hours a day,” he said.

But getting parents to be active in the school is a never-ending battle in Murphy Canyon Heights. Wright holds kaffeeklatsches for parents, to tell them they are welcome anytime.

“Mothers just have the idea that, ‘Why get involved if we are only going to be here two years?’ ” PTA President Irish said. “But you can carry that attitude through 20 years of the military and by the time you are finally settled somewhere, your kids are grown.”

The sales pitch that Irish has used involves challenging the mothers in the community.

“I told them that some people out there say that military people don’t support schools, and that if a school is heavily minority or ethnic, it won’t get our backing,” she said.

“I drafted a letter asking everyone to prove those people wrong . . . that horror stories about military children being hoodlums (are wrong) and that we shouldn’t (allow ourselves) to be looked down upon.”

“One of the biggest improvements we can make is to boost the self-esteem that the kids have,” Thibodeau said, “and show them that being in the military doesn’t (have to) affect (the learning) environment.”