Educating Our Veterans

By CHUCK MASON The Daily News cmason@bgdailynews.com

Back in 1992, a new organization came to Western Kentucky University.

Veteran's Upward Bound Frankie Spaulding of Russellville works on math equations on Tuesday Nov. 20, 2012 at the Veteran's Upward Bound program at Western Kentucky University. Spaulding is a United States Army veteran and plans on attending Bowling Green Technical College. (Photo by Miranda Pederson/Daily News)

It was called Veterans Upward Bound, a federally funded educational outreach for military veterans. The free programs provide instruction and counseling opportunities to help prepare veterans for college or vocational school education. VUB also helps veterans with the paperwork that accompanies school applications or the financial aid process.

Since then, WKU’s VUB has served more than 2,400 student veterans, noted Rick Wright, VUB coordinator-counselor. The campus outreach for veterans is celebrating its 20th anniversary with an open house from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Dec. 7 in Room 129 at Jones-Jaggers Hall. That’s also the nation’s annual Pearl Harbor Day remembrance.

RSVPs to the VUB event are due by Friday to Wright at 270-745-5008 or to rick.wright @wku.edu.

“When I look back on what has brought me to where I am today, I sincerely believe that Veterans Upward Bound played a huge role in getting me here,” Kent Johnson, a junior at WKU, said in a release. Johnson is pursuing a degree in international affairs.

WKU’s VUB served 139 students for the 2011-12 project year, Wright said in a release, and is the only program of its kind in Kentucky. Students working with VUB must show improvement from a pretest to a post test. The goal, according to the grant, is 50 percent of the students who complete classes at the VUB will enroll in college and 10 percent of those who enroll will finish school within six years, whether that consists of obtaining an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree.

Frankie Spaulding of Russellville works on math equations on Tuesday Nov. 20, 2012 at the Veteran's Upward Bound program at Western Kentucky University. Spaulding is a United States Army veteran and plans on attending Bowling Green Technical College. (Photo by Miranda Pederson/Daily News)

Davy Stone, 42, an adult education specialist for VUB for 18 of the 20 years it has operated at WKU, said the building in which the program is housed was once owned by McNeill Elementary School in the Bowling Green Independent School District and served as an observation point for students studying to be teachers at WKU. Computers lining the wall and linked into WKU’s computer network have advanced from the single, dial-up AOL account the program used in its early years.

“I have had plenty of students who went to grade school here,” Stone said, looking around the classroom. “They have an emotional connection to the building.”

The VUB got word this fall that it will be funded, along with 50 other sites across the country, by the U.S. Department of Education for the next five years, $278,881 each year, Wright said. That funding was $14,392,377 for all the VUB programs, Wright said in a release.

When Stone started teaching at VUB in 1994, more people taking advantage of the program were retirees. Even today, he talks to students who have been out of school anywhere from a decade to three times that long. He also sees younger veterans who remember a lot more from their high school days.

Under the terms of the federal grant, VUB has to serve 125 students each year, and it is important that the veterans see VUB before they register for their college classes. Veterans often face tight time lines in when they receive money for schooling and when they need to act on it.

“Veterans want to enroll today – they don’t want to take developmental classes,” Stone said.

“Veterans Upward Bound is an incredible resource, especially for veterans like me who have no benefits,” said Teresa K. Jameson, a WKU student, in a release. Jameson is majoring in history and social studies with teacher certification and plans to graduate in May 2014, the release noted.

“I was so worried about going back to college that I didn’t know where to begin. I found Veterans Upward Bound and they helped make the maze of paperwork much simpler and even helped me get my math skills back to the level necessary for college,” she said in the release.

VUB offers refresher instruction to veterans in math, writing, literature, science and foreign language. The math is often pre-calculus, the writing is part of the English curriculum and the literature satisfies the reading requirement, Stone said.

One new program being developed at the VUB for next spring is a class on financial literacy, Stone said. It will give students information on understanding loans and talking about savings and money for school.

“This grant cycle we are not assuming that people already have these (financial literacy) skills. We are going to offer it to a student if they want it,” Stone said.

The VUB classes meet twice a week and students receive a $5 stipend up to $40 a month to attend.

Budget cutbacks over the years have meant discontinuing field trips. “In the early years, we used to take students to Washington, D.C.,” Stone said, “but now we put more of the budget into classroom education.”

VUB serves Allen, Barren, Butler, Edmonson, Hart, Logan, Simpson and Warren counties.