GI Pipeline to Schools May Dry Up

As a Navy pilot, Jim Palkie hunted Russian submarines in the Pacific and dodged enemy fire over Libya. He tracked missile launches and space shuttle landings.

But nothing, not 20 years of military training nor thousands of hours at the controls of some of the world’s mightiest aircraft, prepared him for his current command.

Now he sits in the cross hairs of nearly two dozen fidgety 5-year-olds who are not the least intimidated by his military record.

Trying to take the class roll on a recent morning, he’s interrupted by a girl wanting to show off her new purple boots, and then by a boy commenting on the teacher’s new haircut.

“OK,” Palkie says, waving an oversized red, white and blue pencil to get their attention, “this morning, when I call your name, I want you to answer, ‘School is Cool.’

“This is every bit as challenging as flying an airplane,” sighs Palkie, a 47-year-old kindergarten teacher at Saticoy School in east Ventura. “It doesn’t pay as much, but the job satisfaction is incredible.”

Palkie is one of nearly 300 Californians who have traded military service for careers in the classroom through the federal Troops to Teachers program.

Started in 1994 to help move downsized military personnel into public schools, the program has launched more than 3,000 service men and women on teaching careers. Another 600 former military personnel have gotten teaching jobs through the state Aerospace and Defense Worker Corps.

But the program that put Palkie and his colleagues to work is set to be phased out next fall. This despite the fact that experts say California needs as many as 15,000 new teachers each year just to keep pace with growth and mandated reductions in class size.

Concerned that a program that has benefited soldiers and schoolchildren should not be allowed to die, some lawmakers are looking for ways to save it.

“We have the most educated troops in the history of this country coming out of the service at a time when there is a tremendous need for qualified teachers,” said Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley). “If this program is actually getting these folks into the classroom, then I would be very supportive” of keeping it going.

Palkie, a slender 6-footer with a booming voice, grew up in Minnesota and was commissioned as a Navy officer in 1973. He flew anti-submarine warfare missions out of Hawaii tracking Russian subs, and was at the helm of an E2 Hawkeye radar plane that directed bombing attacks against terrorist targets in Libya in 1986. He finished his career five years ago at the Point Mugu Naval Weapons Station, tracking missile shots.

Learning On the Job

Through a Troops to Teachers internship program with the Los Angeles Unified School District, he was put into a third-grade classroom in 1995 although he had no teaching experience. He was living in Ventura, commuting 130 miles round trip and attending school two days a week to earn his teaching credential.

On his first day on the job, he told the kids he was a Navy pilot and flashed a few photos. That held their attention for about 15 minutes.

“Nothing in the military prepared me for that first day of school,” Palkie said. “Those kids just ate me alive. You learn after a while the tricks that you can do, how to budget your time to keep them interested. If you don’t have a challenging program, they’re not going to listen to you.”

That’s especially true for kindergarten, a grade Palkie is teaching for the first time. He taught first grade last year at Saticoy, but was bumped down to kindergarten this year, making him one of only two male kindergarten teachers in the district.

The trick with younger kids, Palkie says, is to change activities every 10 minutes so they don’t get bored. The other key is to pile on praise, to make them want to come to school each day, to help them feel good about each step of their elementary school exploration.

“Is it OK to mess up?” he asks the youngsters, now shifting to an art project after an hour of counting, writing letters of the alphabet and even dancing the hokeypokey, a favorite activity of the 5-year-old set. “Yeah,” the wobbly voices reply in unison. “Why is it OK?” Palkie pushes.

“Because we’re in kindergarten,” his troops respond.

“That’s right,” their teacher repeats, “because we’re in kindergarten.”

Saticoy Principal Paul Jablonowski said Palkie has been a great addition to his staff, adding that he has even volunteered to head up a leadership program for fifth-grade boys during the lunch hour.

“He’s just brought a lot to the staff,” Jablonowski said. “It’s really fun having someone with his enthusiasm on campus.”

Across the nation, educators and others extol the virtues of Troops to Teachers, saying that it has enabled school districts to recruit older, wiser and generally more committed teachers to the classroom, particularly at rural and inner-city schools that are hard to staff. When the Department of Defense launched the program in 1994, it offered stipends of up to $5,000 to prospective teachers and grants of up to $50,000 to school districts as an incentive to hire former military personnel.

Serving the Country

The grants were phased out in 1995, and since then Troops to Teachers has become a placement program, providing a nationwide database and referral service to school districts that need teachers.

The program has placed teachers at schools in every state but Iowa. California is second only to Texas in recruiting former military personnel into the classroom. In Ventura County, the Ventura Unified School District has tapped the program for two teachers, Palkie and math teacher Donna Wojtak of De Anza Middle School. L.A. Unified has hired 17 teachers out of the military ranks, more than any district in the state.

“We consider former military career people a really good source for recruitment purposes,” said Howard Giblin, Troops to Teachers coordinator for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. “Many of them teach at schools in areas where nobody else wants to teach,” he said. “And we’ve found that many of them become leaders in their schools very quickly.”

Indeed, a report released earlier this year by the National Center for Education Information found that the ex-service people not only become effective educators, but also good role models in their schools.

The program has been particularly good at supplying teachers with backgrounds in math, science and special education, the report said. And it has helped offset a gender imbalance. More than 90% of the former military personnel entering the teaching profession are male, while three-quarters of the overall teaching force is female.

“I think it speaks very, very well for those military folks who pick education as a second career,” said Mace Henderson, second in command of the federal program in Pensacola, Fla. “They bring life experience to the classroom that you just can’t find anywhere else.”

Those kinds of testimonials have spurred some lawmakers to rally around the program as it winds down.

In addition to Gallegly, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office expressed concern about terminating a program that has helped public schools fill badly needed teaching positions. Her office has requested information about the program as a possible first step toward rescuing it.

“The senator is extremely supportive of increasing the number of credentialed teachers in California and the rest of the country,” said Howard Gantman, a spokesman for Feinstein (D-Calif.).

For Palkie, teaching was a natural fit. While the military was in his blood--his father, brother and uncle were all military pilots--so was the classroom. His father went on to become a teacher. And Palkie’s wife, Kate, is a longtime teacher at Ventura’s Sheridan Way School.

A Good Match

So when he retired from the Navy in 1993 and failed to land a job with an airline, the father of two grown daughters started substitute teaching in Ventura. He said he was instantly smitten.

“I wouldn’t do it unless it was fun,” he said. “But I also substituted long enough to know that I really wanted to be with kids who really wanted to be there, which to me is grade school or college. I didn’t need attitudes and hormones.”

In Room 35 at Saticoy School, there is neither. However, his troops have been at work for a couple of hours and it’s getting close to snack time. The retired Navy pilot is clearly hitting some turbulence.

He blows a train whistle and counts to five, and that dials down the volume for a bit. When all else fails, he gathers the youngsters on the rug and utters the magic words: “Crisscross apple sauce, eyes on the teacher!” The students obediently sit cross-legged and quiet down.

When snack time finally arrives, he lines up his charges and marches them out the door, hands on hips and in a line so straight it could pass military inspection.

“I feel like a mother duck sometimes,” he says, snaking through the hallways on his way to the playground.

“But I’ve got the best job in the world. All I’ve got to do is make it interesting each day so they’ll want to keep coming back.”