Rose Sachs and Joseph Bleiberg began working in 2008 on a program that would let campuses better help student veterans make successful transitions from the military to college. But their inspiration for doing so, in many ways, was rooted in the past: Still fresh in their minds, Ms. Sachs says now, was the tumultuous re-entry to civilian life that many returning Vietnam veterans experienced in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when campuses were abuzz with antiwar protests.
“Both Joe and I are from the Vietnam era, so we remember very clearly what happened,” says Ms. Sachs, who leads Montgomery College’s disability support services. “We realized how poorly people were treated when they came back. We did not want this to happen again.”
Along with leading scholars and health-care administrators, Ms. Sachs and Mr. Bleiberg—a longtime psychologist at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, in Washington—came up with a program named Combat2College. Montgomery, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, would adopt it and, the collaborators hoped, it would catch on elsewhere. Its goals were twofold: Tweak the college’s existing policies and services to improve veterans’ college experience—and, given tight budgets, do so at minimal expense.
The concept quickly took shape as Ms. Sachs and others orchestrated a series of small adjustments. They e-mailed faculty members, asking them to list on syllabi contact information for learning more about veterans’ services. Campus administrators established relationships with officials from the county, state, and nearby military installations and hospitals, to stay abreast of regional developments on veterans’ issues and make referrals for clinical services. And college employees made a point to remember—particularly in the beginning, when awareness of veterans was just flickering—to convey a simple message: “Welcome back, and thank you.”
Sometimes Combat2College meant intervening on a student’s behalf. “If you’ve got somebody who has a really difficult time with crowds, just going to the professor and saying, ‘Listen, I’d like so-and-so to be able to leave five minutes early so he or she is not in the hall with a thousand people,’” Ms. Sachs says. “There are little things you can do that are going to make a difference.”
The program took off once it had a face—actually, two faces. With the help of a $100,000 grant from the Wal-Mart Foundation, Ms. Sachs hired a former Marine and Montgomery College alumnus, Jason Franklin, and his wife, Joanna Starling, also an alum. Together the two seek out veterans, connect with them, get a feel for their questions and concerns (often about how their GI Bill benefits work), and encourage them to stop by Combat2College’s small campus lounge.
To the trained eye, it turns out, veterans can be easy to spot.
“It’s the way they walk, or something they’re wearing, or their haircut,” Ms. Starling says. Last year, during a power outage at the height of summer, the couple saw an opportunity in the impromptu outdoor gathering of students. “Jason and I went outside the busiest building with water bottles,” Ms. Starling says. “We found like 15 veterans.”
Another effective tactic is to hover near the financial-aid office, where veterans go to process paperwork for their benefits. That’s how Mr. Franklin found Brian McDermott.
“I was standing in the financial-aid line, completely in my own world, freaking out about financial aid,” says Mr. McDermott, who spent eight years in the service. Mr. Franklin handed him a flier and struck up a conversation.
“He said, ‘You were in the Marine Corps, right?’” Mr. McDermott recalls with a laugh. “It was probably the boots and the lanyard.”
The couple often rely on an informal script to make that initial connection. Mr. Franklin tends to ask a few simple questions: which branch of the military a veteran served in, where he was stationed, when she got out. Usually, the reaction to their overtures is positive.
Every now and then, however, the couple gets a curt response, Ms. Starling says: “I don’t want to hang out with a bunch of soldiers.”
Faculty Allies
This spring, 381 veterans are enrolled at Montgomery College under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, up from 244 in the fall of 2009, the first semester the new bill was in effect. As many as 700 students each semester identify themselves as veterans; not all are using their federal benefits to attend classes. (In all, the college enrolls 60,000 students across three campuses.)
Over a short time, faculty, too, have awakened to the growing presence of veterans and their needs.
Esther Schwartz-McKinzie, an English professor, became fascinated with their experiences after having several veterans in class. So she used a sabbatical semester to create a short documentary about the college’s student veterans.
Ms. Schwartz-McKinzie, who is serving as an interim associate dean at the college, spent two months interviewing 20 veterans, immersing herself in their stories and marveling at some of the mundane details of the transition from military to civilian life that never had occurred to her. Like always wearing a uniform, and then, suddenly, not.
“Military dress signifies your rank and your place in a hierarchy,” she says. “Just by looking at somebody, you can tell what your relationship should be. In the civilian world, you lose that.”
The professor tapped Imani Muleyyar, one of the veterans she had interviewed, a soft-spoken former Army Reservist from Baltimore, to direct the film. (Mr. Muleyyar has since graduated from Montgomery College and now studies film at Towson University.)
The documentary, In Their Own Words, made its debut last fall. In the months since, Ms. Schwartz-McKinzie has fielded energetic requests from fellow faculty members who say they’d like to help student veterans, too. Getting the faculty more involved in Combat2College, say Ms. Sachs and others, is a main challenge for the future.
“People would like to be supportive,” says Ms. Schwartz-McKinzie. But “they don’t always know how.”
But even a brief exchange can be significant, staff members have shown. For Mr. McDermott, the former Marine, meeting Mr. Franklin in the financial-aid office was a turning point.
“I was running into a lot of roadblocks I wasn’t getting help with,” he says. The impromptu conversation changed that. “It definitely showed me there was somebody out there who cared,” he says.
The two former Marines happened to chat at a time when scholarships for textbooks were available to veterans. So Mr. McDermott got an added benefit. “I walked out of there,” he says, “with all my books paid for.”
