This small demographic faces a lot of challenges: parents’ lengthy deployments to combat zones, frequent moves and the constant readjustment as a child looks for a place to fit in, whether with friends, academics, sports, music or simply a place to sit in the lunchroom. With these moves from one military installation to another, often every one, two or three years, there is one constant: You never know the quality of the local public school or how the transition from one school to the next will work out.

My family’s story of frequent military moves is not unusual. It shows the universal challenges faced by military kids. My 11- and 10-year-old daughters are attending their fifth schools. Their experience includes instruction at Montessori, private secular, public and parochial schools. With each new military assignment, my husband and I tried to assess which school option would be the best. At most locations, we chose a secular private or parochial school. We do this not because it’s healthy for our finances, but because we want the best opportunity for our children. We want them to fit in right away without struggling to make sure that the language arts class taught in Tennessee matches what is taught in Massachusetts public schools (it doesn’t). All transitions are hard, but moving a child from one private-school or home-schooling community to another is a gentler, more flexible process than subjecting them to the often rigid rules of public schools. Additionally, many of the public school options either on or right outside a military installation are subpar, and private or home-school options may be better.

Moving frequently with the Army means that our kids are subjected to the tyranny of geography. Most Army installations are in fairly remote locations where the on-post schools were once federally administered by the Department of Defense. As a cost-cutting measure in the past decade, the department has shifted the burden of schooling to the counties. A child who goes to school at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, attends a District of Honolulu school. A child who attends middle school in Fort Hood, Tex., belongs to the Killeen Independent School District. There is never a guarantee that children’s education will shift seamlessly between the states or that students will be granted enough credits to graduate from high school on time, depending on the restrictions of the county or district.

Admittedly, fighting for legislation to help the children of active-duty service members doesn’t make for headline-grabbing news. But as the mother of four, married to an Army officer in his 25th year of service, I know that proposed legislation, such as the Educational Savings Account Act or the CHOICE Act, would bring needed flexibility to many military families.

Frances Tilney Burke is a visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Ph.D. candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She was a special assistant to two deputy secretaries of defense during the George W. Bush administration.

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