IMPACT AID AND THE MILITARY FAMILY

            Mr. Chairman, NMFA and the families we represent are grateful to this Subcommittee for recognizing the importance of the federal responsibility embodied in the Impact Aid Program and its importance to military children.  We thank all Congressional supporters of Impact Aid, especially the Members of the House and Senate Impact Aid Coalitions, for securing another increased appropriation for the program for FY 2003 and for providing authority in the FY 2004 Budget Resolution to support a $50 million increase for Impact Aid.  Your continued support of this program translates into better education for approximately 550,000 military children and several million of their civilian classmates in school districts across the country.

              NMFA presents this statement on behalf of military families, or more specifically on behalf of military children:

• Military families move an average of every 2.9 years, three times the rate of their civilian counterparts.  Military children attend an average of six different schools during their K-12 education.  Less than 20 percent of these children attend Department of Defense schools; the overwhelming majority of military children attend civilian schools dependent on Impact Aid.
• Military children bring a wealth of cultural experiences gained from living in many parts of the world to their new schools.  They also frequently come with gaps in their education that their new teachers must quickly fill while moving the rest of the class ahead.  Sometimes they are far ahead of their new classmates, adding boredom to the list of reasons why they hate moving to yet another new school. 
• Military parents applaud higher accountability standards designed to improve school quality. They do not want their children punished, however, when the various Federal and state initiatives clash, causing difficulties for mobile children. Currently 18 states have graduation requirements linked to performance on state exit exams.  With the rise of these exams and increased graduation requirements, mobile military children’s transfers to new schools are becoming more problematic, especially in the high school years.
• Because of the high military operations’ tempo of the past several years, military children often had to adjust to the new school, face that week of standardized tests, fight for the spot on the newspaper staff, play the basketball game before a crowd of strangers without the support of their military parent.  The increased demands placed on the military force have caused additional stress on the military family. Worry about the safety of a parent in a place far from home where people are shooting at each other while also worrying about your own safety at home make for powerful distractions from the business of education.

 Today’s military force is an educated force and military members have high expectations for their children’s education.  More are accepting or rejecting assignments, or even deciding to leave the military, based on perceptions about the quality of education their children will receive at prospective duty stations.

WHY IMPACT AID?   THE FEDERAL RESPONSIBILITY

 A well-funded Impact Aid program enables districts serving large numbers of military children to approach the level of educational opportunity available in neighboring, non-impacted school districts even though they do not have access to the same kind of tax base.  Impact Aid dollars are targeted to districts where the Federal responsibility is the greatest under the law.   The dollars go directly to school districts with no strings attached.  The local community, the people with the greatest stake in the quality of education in their schools, decides how Impact Aid funds will best serve the basic education needs of all students. Impact Aid funds for special education provide valuable assistance to help the most vulnerable military children receive the education services they need.

Military families and their civilian neighbors understand that the Impact Aid program supports basic education services provided by their local school districts.  They understand the impact the federal presence has on the tax base of these local districts and their states.  They know the impact the transient military lifestyle can have on their local schools.  What they do not understand is why Impact Aid funds fall short of the levels intended by the creators of the program or of the amount needed by their children’s schools.  They want to know why a program so important to the education of their children is not an entitlement and why it is not forward-funded so that their school districts can plan and budget properly. Both military families and their civilian neighbors were horrified to hear—at a time when military members were receiving orders to prepare for war—that the administration’s budget proposal would eliminate Impact Aid funding for military children living off-base..

  Military families hold the government, and the citizens they have sworn to serve and protect, accountable for living up to their promise to provide a quality education for their children.  School districts have accepted the responsibility to educate military children; the Federal government must provide the resources it has promised to support that education.  The intent of the original Impact Aid legislation (P.L. 81-874) was “to provide financial assistance for those local educational agencies upon which the United States has placed financial burden.”  It originally provided an “in-lieu-of-tax” payment equal to the local per-pupil costs for students whose military parent both lived and worked on a federal installation (these students were termed “military A” students) and one-half of the local per-pupil cost for students whose military parent worked on a federal installation but lived in the civilian community (termed “military B” students).

 NMFA thanks the Congress for its continued funding of Impact Aid for the children who live off the installation. Two-thirds of military families live off-base.  Servicemembers living in the civilian community pay property taxes to help support local schools. Because their legal home of record is often in another state, however, they may not significantly contribute to other sources of education funding in the state in which they are assigned.  States provide an increasingly larger share of local districts’ funding.  Under the provisions of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act, military members are protected against dual taxation, thus often exempt from paying state income tax, personal property taxes or license fees for automobiles if they are on military orders away from their home state.  Military children, whether living on- or off-base, impose costs on the district as they move in and out:  records must be prepared, evaluations and testing must be done for special programs, transition labs or remedial programs may be needed. The Federal government’s responsibility, as outlined in the Impact Aid law, is to provide funding in lieu of the taxes lost to enable school districts to meet children’s educational needs on an equal footing with districts not affected by a Federal presence.

FIX THE SCHOOLHOUSE

  For a newly-arrived family in a military community, the sight of a well-maintained, safe, child-friendly school building can calm many anxieties about the latest move.  Unfortunately, too many military children must deal with those anxieties in a school facility that has seen better days.  Their military parents see the deteriorating school building as a symbol of a deteriorating respect for their service to the country.  Although Impact Aid provides much of a heavily-impacted district’s working capital, a district’s payment cannot usually be stretched to fund the facility maintenance and improvements old school buildings need. Construction funds available under the Impact Aid program also do not provide districts with the resources they need to compensate for inadequate tax bases and negligible bonding authority that hinder their ability to fund needed construction projects.

 Military families look to the Members of Congress to ensure that construction funds are made available through the Impact Aid Program to all districts with significant federally-connected student populations. Districts charged with educating large numbers of military children must have access to the construction funding necessary not only to do emergency repairs, but also to improve accessibility for special needs children, upgrade classrooms and other facilities to meet the technological demands of the future, and ensure that school buildings provide a safe environment conducive to learning.

  NMFA remains concerned about the long history of inadequate funding to upgrade and maintain buildings owned by the Department of Education.   The co-terminous districts—civilian districts whose boundaries are the same as the military installations they serve—face difficult prioritization decisions on how to address facility shortfalls.  Other districts with a mix of schools owned by the district and by the Department of Education have been forced to use district funds to bring the Department of Education-owned buildings up to local standards so that the military children attending these schools will not fall behind their peers in district-owned buildings.  

 NMFA urges Congress to ensure access to Impact Aid construction funds for districts educating all categories of federally-connected children, especially those districts that do not have other funding alternatives available.  We also urge the Congress to work with the Department of Defense and the military Services to ensure that school districts experiencing changing enrollments or facility needs because of base closure legislation, compassionate assignment of members with special needs children, or housing privatization initiatives have access to adequate construction funding.

ONE CHILD, MANY SCHOOLS

The education of a military child is a continuum.  As the military child moves from school district to district—from a school receiving Impact Aid in California, to another Impact Aid school in Texas, to a Department of Defense school in Japan, to an Impact Aid school in Kansas—the quality of education she receives in one school will affect the education she and her classmates receive in the next.  Children whose schools are unable to provide necessary educational services could easily fall behind their peers in other districts.  Schools serving these children could face difficulties in maintaining accreditation as states implement tough new standards. A smooth transition into their next school, whether across the state or around the world, benefits military children, their classmates, and their communities.  The Impact Aid Program enables districts affected by the presence of a military installation to offer not only a quality basic education program, but also the support services needed by military children as they transition from school to school. 

The support services offered by their schools are especially important to military families affected by war and frequent deployments.  As servicemembers deploy to dangerous places, they need to know that their family members will be well-cared for at home.  Servicemembers want to know that their children’s school buildings are secure, that school district leaders are working with installation leadership to ensure the safety of children at school and on the school buses.  They want their children’s schools to serve as extra eyes and ears, watching for changes in their children’s behavior and academic performance and ensuring that adequate counseling resources are in place to assist children in dealing with not only the stress of the deployments, but also with the fears of unknown dangers at home.  Teachers and counselors now must help the remaining parent answer the children’s questions of “Why did the military send Dad or Mom away when we could be in danger here?”  Schools educating military children must be prepared to help teachers and other staff members who are also military family members as they deal with the emotions brought on by the combination of domestic threats and large-scale military deployments.  They must often run programs with fewer volunteers, sometimes losing both the deployed servicemembers and their spouses who now have more demands on their time.  They must also help “new” military children, the children of members of the National Guard and Reserves, who may be dealing with deployment for the first time. 

 NMFA is pleased to report that most schools charged with educating military children are stepping up to the challenge. They have become the constant in a changing world and the place of security for military children and their families. The goal, according to one school official, “is to keep things normal for the kids.” The schools’ role is to “train teachers in what to look for and deal with what they find.” NMFA has received many positive stories from parents and schools about how the schools have helped children deal with their fears, keep in touch with deployed parents, and keep focused on learning. In the process, these schools have increased the understanding of their teachers and other staff, as well as their entire communities, about issues facing military families:

·        Some personnel who serve on the USS Lincoln are stationed at Lemoore Naval Air Station (CA). Students and school personnel at the Central Union School District’s Neutra Elementary School, located on the air station, faced a special challenge when they learned that the ship would not be coming home as planned, but would be heading to the Gulf. Neutra’s counselor held sessions in every classroom to help students learn to cope with the disappointing news. Students e-mailed classmates’ deployed parents on-board ships, making the parents feel appreciated and their children feel that their parents were still involved in their education. Pictures of school activities are displayed on the school’s website so that deployed parents can view them. The school is also planning a Special Military Night honoring the personnel who served in the war.

·        District leaders at Indian River Central School District (NY), serving Fort Drum, state that they are “players in the deployment process.” They participate, when asked, in deployment briefings and in information sessions for Family Support Groups and are part of the Fort Drum Educational Liaison Committee. Classes participate in the “Adopt a Platoon” program, in which servicemembers meet with a class before they deploy and then receive pictures and letters from the children during the deployment. Says one district official: “All of this fosters a true sense of community. By knowing the soldiers and making them part of your life, you make the children of the deployed soldiers feel less isolated. Everyone is sharing the pain.”

·        Hawaii’s Joint Venture Education Forum (JVEF), composed of representatives from the Hawaii Department of Education and the military Services, offers a five-session professional development course for teachers in schools with large military populations. One session is dedicated solely to deployment and other related movement and transition issues.

·        The Fort Huachuca (AZ) Accommodation School District #00 provides deployment support in many different ways for their military community, including sponsoring parent classes on handling deployment and holding group counseling sessions for students of deployed soldiers. The sessions focus on developing an understanding of their responsibilities while their parent is deployed: “to be a kid, to be safe, to have fun, and to learn.”

·        Jackson Park Elementary School in the Central Kitsap (WA) School District sponsors a special lunch group each week for children whose Navy parents have deployed from Bangor Submarine Base or Bremerton Naval Base.

 Increases in Impact Aid funding have enabled school districts to better respond to military families’ concerns about quality education and to provide special support during times of high stress and operations tempo. Schools, parents, and the military recognize their interdependence and their shared responsibility for the education of military children and are increasing their communication with each other to ease children’s transition in and out of different school systems.  Military parents view the partnerships between their schools and the military Services—from the unit adopting the local elementary school to a commander’s offer of security assistance to the off-base school during a crisis, to the presence of Service and DoD leadership at educational conferences on the military child—as progress toward relieving some of the anxieties about their children’s education. 

 The educational focus of these efforts is a legacy of a successful, well-funded Impact Aid program.  When the Federal government fulfills its responsibility to provide funding for basic education to districts serving military children, schools can concentrate on providing a high-quality education program for all students.  We thank you, the Members of this Subcommittee, for your leadership in this partnership for the education of military children.  We ask you to continue this role by meeting the Federal obligation to keep the Impact Aid program strong.