Iraq War’s Toll on Our Kids

Maria Brown was sitting in her language arts class on the morning of September 25 when school counselor Byron Burrow went to get her. The 13-year-old girl followed him to the principal’s office, having no idea what was about to happen.

Maria soon learned that her father, Staff Sgt. Kevin R. Brown, had been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq earlier that day, and that her older brother had come to school to gently deliver the news.

“Her reaction was like most children that age who receive such horrendous information,” says Burrow, who is half of the husband-and-wife counseling team at Audie Murphy Middle School in Killeen, TX.

Burrow and his wife, Susan, who began working at the school shortly after the Iraq War started in 2003, are trained for moments like these because their school is on Fort Hood, the largest active-duty army base in the nation. They serve a population of 600 students, all except 15 with a parent or sibling in the military.

So far, Audie Murphy has had to deal with three war-related deaths, says Media Specialist Elizabeth Maldonado, who is on standby each time tragedy strikes. She closes her library and turns it into a “safe room” so that students can receive counseling or work out their grief.

Some 1.8 million U.S. children have a parent or sibling in the military, and 700,000 of those have at least one parent deployed to places like Iraq or Afghanistan, says Jaclyn Collins of the Military Child Education Coalition, a nonprofit group that helps ease the challenges faced by military children. And with so many military bases around the country—some with schools on their grounds—librarians serving those schools have come up with ways to reach out to kids.

Maldonado says she tries to incorporate a military theme every time she teaches a lesson on the Big6 information literacy skills. She also has a large collection of nonfiction books, such as Human Rights in the Middle East by Gail Stewart and Life of an American Soldier in Iraq (both Gale/Lucent, 2004) by Michael V. Uschan.

Julie McCormack, the librarian at nearby Peebles Elementary, says her school counselor typically chooses a subject, such as bereavement or abandonment, and teachers develop lessons around those topics. McCormack also focuses on searching for print and online resources and creating lessons that support the school’s “international inquiry curriculum,” which keeps students abreast of current world affairs. McCormack’s library has turned into a de facto counseling center. “It’s not unusual to have students stopping by the library just to talk about their mothers, fathers, or other relatives in Iraq,” she says.

Angela Hopkins, a librarian at Widewater Elementary School outside the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Stafford, VA, uses a military theme for her schoolwide Accelerated Reader program. Ruth Jean Shaw, the manager of library resources for the Anchorage School District in Alaska—which serves the children of nearby air force, army, and national guard bases—says her schools have more than 80 related fiction titles, including Mommy, You’re My Hero (Little Redhaired Girl, 2005) by Michelle Ferguson-Cohen and While You Are Away (Hyperion, 2004) by Eileen Spinelli. And Media Specialist Carole Ashbridge of Sackets Harbor Central School near Fort Drum in upstate New York, says she’s added books and created bibliographies that focus on diversity.

About 90 percent of the 2,000 students at Shoemaker High School near Fort Hood have at least one parent or sibling in the military and 50 percent have at least one parent deployed overseas.

Librarian Laura Gregory says, “They tell us to keep everything as normal as possible,” so she’s built a collection of graphic novels and manga. The truth is, she adds, is that all teachers are more focused on preparing students for the state’s standardized test, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, than on helping kids cope with having a loved one in the military.