Thread: Colleges Focus on Veterans as GI Bill Ups Numbers

Some good news for the Fourth of July!

Colleges Focus on Veterans As GI Bill Ups Numbers
Saturday, July 4, 2009 12:25 PM

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. -- With a fattened GI Bill covering full tuition and more, the number of veterans attending college this fall is expected to jump 30 percent from last year to nearly half a million. That's left many universities looking for ways to ease the transition from combat to the classroom.

Vets already in school have run into problems including campus bureaucracy, crowds that can trigger alarm instincts honed by war and fellow students who don't understand their battlefield experiences.

In response, colleges across the country are offering veterans-only classes, adding counselors and streamlining the application and financial aid process.

Under the new GI Bill expanded by Congress last year, the number of military veterans either starting or continuing their studies this fall is expected to top 460,000, up from 354,000 last autumn, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Many of them will encounter a classroom culture shock that can leave them agitated.

Ask Colin Closs, a former Fort Campbell soldier studying at Cleveland State University in Ohio, what bothers him most about how veterans are treated on campus and he lists strange and sometimes rude questions people have asked.

"Was it hot?"

"Were you always in a tent?"

"Did you ever kill anybody?"

Closs benefited this past school year from a program at Cleveland State started in 2007 by chemistry professor John Schupp to form some freshman-level classes with all veterans. Schupp's idea is to keep the military men and women together as a unit so they can support and motivate each other.

The University of Arizona adopted his program last year and schools in at least a dozen states are working on programs modeled on Cleveland State.

Closs said after leaving the military, he had trouble interacting with people who don't understand his wartime experiences. But when he takes classes with other veterans, they can talk about problems they may have, whether its educational or personal.

"It's like the VFW hall without the alcohol," Closs said.

The University of West Florida in Pensacola, not far from Eglin Air Force Base, is adding counselors to help service members with post traumatic stress disorder or other emotional problems, but administrators recognize that veterans don't want to be categorized as disabled.

"They feel like they are ostracized, or there's a stigma attached, so how we handle that is getting a lot of scrutiny," said Marc Churchwell, the school's military education program coordinator.

Churchwell, who is retired from the Navy, said his own experience with the previous GI Bill made him want to make the process easier for the next generation of men and women in the military.

"It was very frustrating for me to the point I was ready to quit," Churchwell said. "My goal is for those people to come to me so they don't have to deal with it."

The University of California Los Angeles has short orientation sessions for veterans and is creating an Iraq and Afghanistan veterans readjustment group in the fall.

Matthew Nichols, a psychologist who just joined UCLA's counseling and psychological services after working for the VA, said he's hopeful that students will feel more comfortable asking for help on a college campus versus walking into a veterans hospital.

"These are everyday concerns," he said. "It's much less about 'there's something wrong with me,' and more about 'how can I study a little better?'" he said.

Universities that have traditionally served military students are also finding that their new and returning students need help navigating the bureaucracy of the enrollment process.

At Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., just outside of Fort Campbell, Ky., the school has been holding community meetings about the new GI Bill and helping administrators from other colleges who have questions.

As the largest veteran-enrolled college in the state, about 15 percent of their students get some kind of veterans education benefit, whether they are surviving spouses, retired or still on active duty. They'll be adding faculty in some departments, including political science, for the expected increase in students using the new benefits and just opened a new extension building on the base this year to serve military students.

Congress voted last year to dramatically expand the GI Bill. The old measure offered $1,321 a month to cover all college costs. Effective Aug. 1, the new bill will cover tuition and fees for any in-state public university, a housing allowance and $1,000 a year for books and supplies.

Even though getting the old GI Bill was a recruiting point for the military for decades, many soldiers have had trouble going back to school, sometimes because they are older and often have families.

Jason Davis, 28, enlisted in the Army only a couple of weeks after Sept. 11 after dropping out of high school and facing minimum-wage jobs. Davis deployed twice to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, and then was stop-lossed, a military practice of holding troops beyond their enlistment dates. He spent another 18 months after that in the California National Guard.

The former sergeant said he struggled to find a job to support his wife and baby boy after leaving the military in 2008, mainly because his combat infantry job didn't translate into good work experience.

"There was no direction and I had to figure out everything on my own," he said. "I felt like I was left to swim alone."

He's been taking classes at a local community college in Irvine, Calif., and tried to start up a student veterans group, but found that many have barriers that keep them from getting involved on campus. "We're all older, or we have families, obligations or jobs," he said.

With the extra benefits coming to him under the new GI Bill, Davis will be able to afford to study literary journalism at the University of California at Irvine next fall. "It's something I've been wanting for a long time," he said.

http://www.newsmax.com/us/us_colleges_a ... 31919.html

Jul 5, 12:01 AM EDT
Teacher's mission: Guide vets back to campus
By MEGHAN BARR
Associated Press Writer

CLEVELAND (AP) -- John Schupp pulled his car onto a country road lined with half-grown corn. Dark clouds obscured the sun, and he couldn't tell which way pointed east or west. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

He was lost.

But he reminded himself of why he was here - of his self-appointed mission to find the soldiers and bring them back to college. It was his turn now. He pressed down on the gas pedal of his old, gold-colored Honda, remembering a conversation.

In the college chemistry class he taught, a student back home from duty in Kosovo described to him what it was like to be a veteran on campus. She felt like an outcast, she said.

The comment stirred Schupp - who had always admired soldiers' sacrifices to protect people they'd never met. He was not a veteran himself, and even said the thought of dying terrified him.

He starting asking around. On America's college campuses, he learned, the young woman's reaction was not unusual. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are being swallowed up by the crowds. In class, many scan the windows for snipers and warily size up fellow students. Set adrift from the military, they can grow discouraged and disappear.

And so the professor who never wanted to fight realized he had a battle on his hands. The ones who had protected him for so long needed his protection now.

His first stop: The diner in a small Ohio town, where a soldier's mother waited patiently for him.

He wished he'd remembered to bring a map.

It's tough to refuse a guy like Schupp (pronounced SHOOP'), who talks fast, is equal parts deferential and pushy, and doesn't hesitate to ask deeply personal questions.

What's your passion in life? What do you want to do with yourself?

A history buff, he pored over books and dissected statistics about veterans, searching for an answer in the numbers. He read about the 7.8 million World War II veterans who used their GI bill benefits to earn college diplomas. He prodded military officials for facts.

Today, just 8 percent of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are fully using the $36,000 for college guaranteed by the GI bill, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The military doesn't track graduation rates.

The veterans of the "greatest generation" had proved it could be done, he thought. What was going wrong?

Slowly, the big idea lit up his brain. The proof was in the past. In 1945, veterans outnumbered everyone else on campus.

"They succeeded as a group, as a unit," he says excitedly, as if sharing a secret. He leans forward, gripping his coffee mug. "So I'm recreating the same thing that happened then."

What he needed to do seemed simple: Form a military unit within the classroom. He needed to disguise counseling sessions as English and Math 101. The unit would survive together, no soldier left behind.

If veterans took classes together - without other students around - they could help each other through the transition to civilian life.

"So I said let's change the environment, see what happens," he says. "Experiment."

He approached camouflage-clad guys in the hallways. He landed interviews in local newspapers touting veterans-only classes. He also held a veterans' fair - but nobody showed up. Later, he learned a possible explanation: "They're told if you're in a crowd, you're as good as dead."

That summer, Schupp drove all over the state - to county fairs, to small-town diners - peddling his idea like a salesman. He met with military mothers and wives, who passed along word of an all-veterans program to soldiers finishing deployments overseas.

He campaigned like a politician, donning a suit and tie for visits to the Capitol, asking lawmakers to fork over $100,000 for a program that didn't exist.

And they did.

So it happened that on a cold December afternoon in 2007, administrators at Cleveland State University found themselves in the curious position of having public funding available for an academic program they hadn't yet approved. Veterans sat in the lecture hall as Schupp's numbers flashed slide by slide, making a case for them.

Steve Slane, an associate dean, recalled the reaction of many: "Wait a minute, this is a good idea, maybe we should be doing this."

The program, christened Supportive Education for the Returning Veteran, or SERV, would consist of four core classes - history, math, biology and chemistry - taught by volunteer teachers. It would have an office squeezed between Women's' Studies and Disability Services.

With just 14 veterans enrolled, some classes would have no more than four students, costing the university thousands of dollars.

Schupp knew it was a gamble.

That didn't scare him. He already knew what failure was like.

The irony was he never wanted to be a chemist.

He had dreamed of being an actor. Fame and fortune and Hollywood. His mother discouraged that as unrealistic.

For a time after college, he ran his own company growing crystals used in Lasik eye surgery. Shards of crystals grew in furnaces he built himself.

But there was a big major risk: If power went out - for instance, because of lightning - and the furnaces failed, the batch he'd been painstakingly growing for weeks would be destroyed.

"It got to the point where I hated thunderstorms," Schupp remembers.

One day in 2003, there was a bad failure, a big loss of crystals. In the end, Schupp was forced out of his own business.

He was unemployed, divorced, devastated. His career as a chemist was finished. He took odd jobs to pay the bills and cared for his aging parents on the northern Ohio farm where he'd been raised.

His father had been a chemistry teacher. As he stumbled through those bleak days, Schupp decided to try his luck in the classroom and took a part-time job. At the blackboard, facing rows of attentive faces, he remembered once again the thrill of having an audience.

"To be a teacher, you gotta perform," he says.

Nowadays, he's still happily teaching but he's also got a new job, promoting and running SERV. And it's going better than anybody could have expected.

"How did math go, Lenny? It go OK?"

"Johnny, you getting it all right?"

Two veterans walk in late, and Schupp anxiously peppers them with questions, a stub of chalk in his hand. His students lean across the aisles conferring over decimal points and zeros.

One guy frowns at his notebook, grimacing over an equation. Jeff Schaefer, a former Marine with tattooed arms and a striped polo shirt, notices right away.

"Justin, you want me to show you the way I do it?" he asks.

Every student in this humming room has served in the military. Most are in their 20s. Many were part of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Some came because their wives or girlfriends told them to. For others, it was word of mouth: Did you hear about the professor who's teaching classes just for vets?

There's Jeff DeLuca, 26, who hid in his bedroom with the blinds closed for two years after he lost most of his unit in Fallujah. Shrapnel is still buried in his shoulder, a reminder of the time he knocked a fellow Marine aside to take a hit from a grenade. The VA deemed him unemployable, 60 percent disabled, a classic case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Remembering things is a struggle. He eyes other students suspiciously in the hallways. Running in a loop in his mind is a gunman-barges-into-the-classroom scenario.

And yet, seated beside other veterans, he can relax. He burrows down and focuses on the work. He can't explain why.

"I just know that I don't have to protect anybody," he says.

There's Schaefer, 24, who makes quips in class but turns reflective when asked what the program has done for him.

"It's kind of like our classes are our mission now," he says.

There's Bob Mastronicola Jr., 44, who spent 24 years in the military and has been trying to earn his bachelor's degree since 1984. It was always God and country first, education later, he says. He travels to military demobilization ceremonies, recruiting new soldiers to join the program.

He still gets discouraged sometimes, but Schupp won't let him quit.

Schupp greets the veterans when they first step onto campus. He takes them out for coffee. He gets them acquainted with the registrar's office and the dining hall.

"He came and picked me up, got me down here within three days and had all the paperwork done," says Schaefer, who didn't have a car at the time.

Veterans are sprawled around the program's office typing up papers, lounging on the bench they swiped from the hallway. It's a safe haven, this place. Here they don't have to absorb the curious looks from other students. They don't have to hear the questions: "Have you ever killed anyone?" They don't have to dwell on the things they've seen that they would prefer to forget.

Schupp, though, can draw them out. He wants to know about their wives, their lives, their homework. As he stands in the doorway joking around, the veterans discreetly pass around a coffee can filled with cash. They are buying him another gift for no particular reason. Last year's present, an American flag, is propped up near his desk.

"I tell him every day, `Man, you changed my life,'" DeLuca says. "`You don't even know.' And like, I get chills. I wanna cry."

Now in its third semester, the program that started with so few has swelled to more than 100. The remarkable thing, Schupp says, is that the veterans need only a semester or two before they're ready to join the masses.

They've hit some stumbling blocks. A class on Iraqi history - Schupp's idea - didn't go over too well. Not a single veteran cared to spend time studying that country's troubled past.

"Guys were walking out," Schupp acknowledges.

Soldiers are on their way home from Iraq in growing numbers. And the military expects growing numbers to take advantage of the new, revamped GI bill that kicks in this fall, offering better college benefits. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio has sponsored a bill inspired by Schupp's program that authorizes grants for colleges to establish campus centers for veterans. It was folded into the Higher Education Act of 2008 and awaits funding from Congress.

And the military has taken notice. Transition briefings for returning soldiers will likely begin incorporating information about Schupp's program, said Brig. Gen. Arnold N. Gordon-Bray, deputy commanding general for the U.S. Army Cadet Command at Fort Monroe, Va.

Enamored with Schupp's success, universities in at least a dozen states - from Mississippi to Pennsylvania, Arizona to New York - are working on all-veterans programs, using Cleveland State as a model.

But they need his help. A few weeks ago, Schupp climbed back into his car, his sights set on the desert.

"I'm on Route 66 in New Mexico. It's tremendous," he yells happily into the phone when a reporter reaches him.

He's on the road again. This time, though, he knows where he's headed.

On the Net:

http://www.csuohio.edu/academic/serv/

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/ ... SECTION=US