All five high schools adjacent to Fort Hood, Texas will soon be equipped with Interactive Counseling Centers, thereby promoting easy access to state-of-the-art counseling support for military-connected students who must change schools as their military parents transition from one installation to another.
With any relocation, parents and children have questions on curriculum, advancement, course content, grades transfer, student activities, and the like. In the past, those questions might not be answered until the family arrived at its new duty station. With an Interactive Counseling Center system, that no longer needs to happen; parents and children now can “know before they go.”
The systems, developed through the Military Child Education Coalition (MCEC) (website: www.militarychild.org), provide real time, internet-supported live, point-to-point voice, video, data and document imaging, plus face-to-face counseling opportunities for high school students, families and counselors, even though the gaining and losing schools might be thousands of miles apart. But to make it all work, schools need ICC units and, at least in Central Texas, that’s where AUSA fits in.
The Central Texas-Fort Hood Chapter, AUSA has donated $10,000 to place Interactive Counseling Centers at both Ellison and Harker Heights High Schools in the Killeen Independent School District. Last September, the chapter donated $5,000 to provide an ICC unit for Killeen High School and earlier, the Military Child Education Coalition funded systems for Shoemaker High School, the fourth high school in Killeen Independent School District, and for the one system needed at the Copperas Cove, Texas High School. Now, all five high schools directly serving Fort Hood have on-campus ICC systems. Students are better informed, and future relocations will be a lot less stressful.
The Central Texas-Fort Hood Chapter is convinced the ICC holds great promise for assisting military-connected students, and is leading the charge to convince other AUSA chapters to finance installation of the centers in other military-impacted school districts. “We felt it was the right thing to do. The center fits in with AUSA’s goal of providing a long-term family support system,” commented Ralph Gauer, president of the Central Texas-Fort Hood Chapter.
Gauer also e-mailed all 128 other AUSA chapters, urging them to participate in this “very important work.” A retired soldier whose own children moved from three to five times during their high school years alone, Gauer believes this is one of the most important projects an AUSA chapter can undertake.
ICC units are now located in 52 schools in 16 US states and five overseas locations. More are scheduled for installation in coming months, and MCEC has a goal of seeing an ICC system in every high school, worldwide, with a significant military family population.
“MCEC’s goal is for every school district that serves military-connected students to have access to at least one ICC system,” according to Dr. Mary Keller, executive director of MCEC.
The story will run in tomorrow's Killeen Daily Herald and went regionally on CBS TV tonight.