It Takes a Village: Developing a Model for Delivering School-Based Mentoring to Military-Connected Students

Military families face recurring and at times significant stresses, including the strain of combat deployment, difficulties with reintegration post-deployment, and frequent moves to places away from extended family. The vast majority of military-connected students are enrolled in civilian schools, but their parents often lack confidence that their children’s schools are responsive to the needs of military students and parents (www.bluestarfam.org). Indeed, most school districts lack the infrastructure needed to identify and support military students (Astor, Pedro, Gilreath, Esqueda, & Benbenishty, 2013). Military families also tend to value “taking care of their own”, which it can make it difficult to engage them at times. Because many schools struggle with how to support these students, scholars have called for research on ways schools can provide greater and more targeted support to these highly mobile students (De Pedro et al., 2011; Esqueda, Astor, & De, 2012).

The Military Student Mentoring (MSM) Project is an IES-funded study that aims to develop and evaluate a strategy whereby school districts can offer a measured response to military students. The project involves developing and testing school-based mentoring (SBM) as a form of support for military students. We reasoned that SBM, when implemented with fidelity, can buffer military students from family strain and upheaval and prevent a decline in their academic performance and school behavior (Wheeler et al., 2010).

We assumed that effectively engaging military students and parents requires coordination of multiple system as well as an earnest investment by the school district. Key to coordination is a district employee who can liaison among schools, reach out to military parents, partner with local mentoring agencies, and connect with local community volunteers. In the first two years of this project, we developed and launched the MSM service delivery model and the MSM school-based mentoring model.

In this presentation, we describe our iterative process of model development, including efforts survey school districts and mentoring agencies in the U. S. and to draw from parent focus groups critical information about the goals and structure of military student-specific SBM. We will describe how the program (called Mentor Connections) required coordination of multiple systems (i.e., schools, military families, community-based mentoring organizations and other community partners), by the district-level employee. We will also present initial data on the usability and feasibility of the Mentor Connections program.