AURORA | These children come from a different culture, and fitting in to the larger world isn’t always simple.
When Pourshia Chambers-Motley sent two of her three children to class at Murphy Creek K-8 in 2009, she worried about how their teachers would respond if they had bad days. Chambers-Motley and her husband weren’t the only service members posted at Buckley Air Force Base to have children enrolled in local public schools. Chambers-Motley, who lived off-base, knew plenty of other Buckley staff who had ties to the local community.
But Chambers-Motley still felt apart; she still felt her children were living between two worlds. She thought the teachers might not recognize the signs of separation in her children, the specific stress that came with their father’s deployment to a war zone.
“When my husband deployed, my two older ones struggled with it a lot. I didn’t know if the staff understood if they were acting out or having bad days,” said Chambers-Motley, a tech sergeant at Buckley. “That was hard initially.”
There are hundreds of K-12 students across Aurora who deal with similar issues. Students in both of Aurora’s public school districts with connections to Buckley Air Force base have to deal with a parent’s deployment, an unexpected move to a new city and other challenges tied to military life. Even for the military families who live off base, that kind of dual existence can carry specific stresses for parents and children alike. It can likewise affect the families of the thousands of civilian contractors that work at Buckley.
“We’re military families, and there are a lot of things that are out of our control,” said Brandi Ruiz, Buckley’s School Liaison Officer, during the Cherry Creek School Board meeting held at Polton Elementary School on April 15. “What is in our control is our children.”
Since Ruiz started as the new official ambassador between the base and the local school districts more than six months ago, she’s worked to educate others about the double life children connected to the base can face. She’s reached out directly to the districts’ superintendents and administrators; she’s spoken at APS and Cherry Creek school board meetings to detail the challenges and update each district’s approach to dealing with these children.
Ruiz insists that the effort could have benefits for students, parents and the school district. There’s federal funding impact aid available for districts with a certain number of military and federally connected families, and Ruiz believes Aurora districts could qualify. The amount of money available depends on a complicated formula based on the number of students and parents’ employment on federal property.
But Ruiz insists that it’s worth updating the numbers and counts, especially considering that the total federal impact aid budget approved for 2013 topped $1 billion.
“I think when people look at impact aid, they think military and active duty and living on the installation only. That’s so not the point,” Ruiz said, adding that families of civilian contractors can also qualify. “I’m afraid that we’re not asking the right questions … Aurora Public Schools is the only district in the area that collects any data,” Ruiz said. “Nobody else does. Nobody is requiring that information at registration.”
Ruiz points to statistics gathered by the Military Children Youth Demographics in September 2012 as her main argument. According to the counts, there were 712 school-age children with military ties; in Arapahoe County, that number was 2,074. The threshold to qualify for impact aid money is 1,000 students. With those numbers in mind, Ruiz believes the count at APS of 864 students with ties to the military and federally connected land is low.
“You have military connected, which is very specific, military families, National Guard or Reserve,” Ruiz said. “But federally connected can include government civilians and contractors … We have over 14,000 that physically work on this installation. That’s huge. Lots of these people have kids.”
But APS administrators stand by the count of 864. They ask specific questions about military ties for every student who registers at the district. There’s a section on the APS registration form that specifically asks about military installations, active or reserve duty or federal employment.
“We want to just clarify. When she’s talking about numbers from Adams and Arapahoe counties, Aurora Public Schools is a small portion of those two counties. We’re 8 percent of Adams County and 30 percent of Arapahoe County,” said APS Deputy Superintendent William Stuart. “We just want to make sure that we’re talking apples to apples.
The Cherry Creek district stopped formally counting military and federally connected students years ago. Officials at the district say their counts never turned up enough numbers to come close to qualifying for federal impact aid.
“We used to ask incoming students, and we did this for a lot of years and we just never had enough to qualify for the impact aid. We never had nearly enough,” said Cherry Creek spokeswoman Tustin Amole. “If we believed that the number was increasing, we could go back.”
Ruiz pushed district leaders to take a new look at those numbers during her presentation to the board last week. She spoke about how Cherry Creek was a “district of choice” for many of the service members coming into the base.
“I know we’ve got military out there … we’re in your neighborhoods.”
Chambers-Motley and her family are still in the Murphy Creek neighborhood that feeds into APS. Her husband has returned from deployment to his job on the base. The couple now have a third child enrolled in Murphy Creek K-8, and the pressure of existing between civilian and military life is no longer so heavy. While many of the Buckley families in APS shifted to the new Vista PEAK campus in southeast Aurora when it opened a few years ago, Chambers-Motley and her children have found valuable connections.
“Over the last couple of years, it’s been pretty smooth. They know us now, and we’re always there,” Chambers-Motley said. “We try to do a fundraiser at least once a quarter. But it seems like we do all of them.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707