The Life Of A Military Kid

Five elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools.  Five states, two countries, and up to ten different houses.  Not your typical childhood life is it?  Well for a military brat like me, it's really not all that far fetched.  For the majority of us, we are having to move every few months or years, if you are lucky enough.  It is not easy, but we do it because our parents fight for our country and what we stand for.  Our parents do something admirable, so we hold our heads high and make the best of every new home and every new situation we are in.

However, there are some obstacles that never get easier no matter how many times a family may move.  In every county, and in every state the school systems are run in different ways, with different expectations of their teachers as well as their students.  To be thrown into a new school, with no friends and no one to help you is very difficult.  Everything from the way the school is built, to the educational level, could all be completely different from the school before.

In elementary school, your parents are not allowed to walk around with you for a week to help you get settled.  In middle school and high school, there are no teachers to walk around with you to show you where your next class is going to be.  On the first day of class, you have no idea what the teacher is going to expect you to know or what level she expects you to be at.  

There are no set guidelines for the schools in the United States.  Every school has a different view of what students should know and at what year.  If your last school was more relaxed in their teaching methods, you would be left behind.  If they were more strict, then you would be left to relearn everything and you would be left alone for the whole year.  Each place is different.  Each place has no warning and no help.

One thing that remains constant, however, is the fact that in every school, every student has a guidance counselor they can go to for their academic and personal needs.  Being the new student, junior year in high school, you need help in both categories.  

Halfway through high school, moving from a DODEA school in Germany to a public high school in Harnett County, North Carolina, a person needs help.  Not once was I called into the guidance office to see how I was adjusting.  My little sister, a new student as a freshman in this school, was never talked to and never even given a second thought. The one person that can help a student in a school, does nothing.  Does not help in any way possible.  Not a single conversation, not a single email, nothing.  

In all of my years of being raised in a military family, not once was I pulled into a guidance counselor’s office.  Not when I moved half-way through first grade from Georgia to a school in Oklahoma.  Not when I moved from Oklahoma to North Carolina in third grade to a DODEA school on Fort Bragg.  Then again in fourth grade, when I moved to a public school, I was on my own with no office visit.  In seventh grade, I moved to Germany, amidst all military kids and I’m not the only new student this year.  However, not one of us was asked how we were doing or how our transition was going.  We are left to fend for ourselves, and we feel forgotten, and unimportant.  

We become resilient.  Almost like a chameleon, easily adaptable in nearly every situation.  We blend well into our environment, you barely know we’re there.  Everyone barely knows we’re there.  We pack up our lives, at a moment's notice, and start the process all over again.  We leave our friends, we leave our new lives, and they now join our old ones.  Our lives are tossed around and lost in the masses.  We lose our friends everywhere we go, and we lose ourselves, little by little.  In order to survive, we must adapt, and we must learn the social ways of our new home, as well as the academics of our new school.