October 28, 2010
Four spouses share how the new rules changed their education, careers.It’s not a stretch for Leanne Taulbee to say she’s feeling the full “frontier” effects of her husband’s PCS to the Alaskan tundra. She hoped that an educational grant program for military spouses would ease the difficult life- and career-transition. But the Department of Defense changed its qualification requirements, and Taulbee will stay unemployed for lack of resources to go back to school.
Taulbee has been a mammographer for 20 years. When she moved to Anchorage in 2008, a hiring manager bluntly told her she wouldn’t work due to competition from native Alaskans. It was also impossible to look for jobs in other Alaskan cities, as they were hours away.
So Taulbee decided to go back to school to become a dental assistant. She received approval to start a 10-week certificate course, using Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts (MyCAA). But she lost MyCAA in August after it only became available to spouses of E1-E5, W1-W2 and O1-O2 ranks. Taulbee’s husband is a W3 and also is a retiree re-call who came back into the service after 9/11. He’s not eligible for bonuses or promotions.
“For the first time in my life, I’m on unemployment,” she says, adding that she fills her days as a volunteer coordinator for Red Cross at Elmendorf Air Force Base. “I could’ve started working as soon as I graduated. Losing MyCAA was a slap in the face. I said to my husband, ‘Your rank isn’t high enough so I don’t have to work, but it’s too high for us to get any assistance.’”
DoD halted MyCAA in February but restarted it in July with limitations. At that time, Clifford Stanley, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said MyCAA was returning to its original intent: to help spouses with the greatest need.
“The MyCAA program popularity grew beyond our expectations and became too expensive to continue. Therefore, we are returning to the original intent of the program in a way that is attainable and fiscally responsible for the Defense Department,” he said. (For more on DoD’s viewpoint, see the related Q&A interview with Robert Gordon, III, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy at the
MyCAA Action Center.)
Spouses say, however, that DoD let them down after committing to “invest in military families.” Here are their concerns:
SCENARIO #1:“Six months ago, I could have looked for alternate funds. I was told too little, too late.”Dana Roberts is studying to be an R.N. at Raritan Valley Community College in Manville, NJ. She was working at an externship this summer and was so busy that she missed a form letter sent to all MyCAA participants in July.
It was August when she realized she was losing MyCAA. Roberts has a 4.0 GPA and could have investigated alternate funding sources if she’d known earlier. She expected personalized contact from DoD, not a generic letter.
She lost MyCAA because her husband fell under Title 32, not Title 10. He’s an O2 with the Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Command. However, when he deploys next year, he’ll be under Title 10 again. “I can go back next year when my husband is deployed, but I have two kids. So I’m expected to take care of the kids while he’s gone and go back to school? Where is the logic in that?” Roberts says.
In the meantime, Roberts is paying for the last year of school in full. She’s supposed to graduate in May. She’s not happy with the reaction of a MyCAA counselor.
“She said, ‘Oh well, I’m sorry but if it’ll make you feel better, your money will go into the pot and will help another spouse out,’” Roberts says. “I’m paying my bills later and later. I’m not sure what else to do, but pile money onto the credit card. I’m halfway through and can’t stop. I just have to grin and bear it and get through.”
SCENARIO #2:“My husband wasn’t regular Army.”Lizabeth Flores needed a special English Learner certification to teach middle-and high-school language arts in California.
She’d moved from Puerto Rico to California, because her husband is in an XO in the California National Guard in Long Beach. He’ll deploy for his second tour to Iraq in November.
To receive the EL certification from Phoenix University, it costs $4,000. In January, MyCAA approved her for $6,000. But in July, Flores received past-due notices. She discovered MyCAA had stopped paying her bill.
“Even though he’s active duty, we were told he was ‘just the Guard.’ (MyCAA) said he was not ‘regular Army,’ and that we have to be Title 10 instead of Title 13,” Flores says.
She had to pay $2,000 out of pocket to finish the certification. “I need the certificate to work and need a job,” she says.
SCENARIO #3:“Funding was pulled at the most critical point of my education.”Estella Steele’s situation is similar to Taulbee’s, in that her husband’s rank disqualified her. He’s a W4, assigned to the US Army Aviation Flight Test Directorate at Ft. Rucker, AL, as an experimental test pilot.
Steele is currently enrolled in a two-year ADN (registered nurse) program at Wallace Community College and expects to graduate in May 2012 with an Associate Degree in Applied Sciences. She was approved in June 2009 for $6,000 but was not made aware of her acceptance until the spring 2010 semester, when she began using the grant to pay for her tuition.
Her financial aid advisor at Wallace told her about the funding problems.
“At the time that the new rules came out, I had finished all my prerequisites and been accepted into the ADN program. MyCAA funding is still available to me through the spring semester (because of the start date and the clause allowing us to apply for the funds ahead of time). After the spring 2011 semester, I am hoping to find other scholarships to help me finish my last three semesters. But since I am now committed into this program, I do intend to finish this education somehow,” she says.
Steele adds she’d entered into a contract with DoD when she accepted the grant and the conditions that were in place at the time of her application.
“I have held up my end of that contract by consistently following through with the education plan I submitted for approval. I have held my GPA at 3.8 and better throughout my schooling. I feel that DoD has breached our contract by pulling the funding at this most critical point in my education,” she says.
SCENARIO #4:“I found a loophole, but only just in time.”Rebecca Siekman is like a lot of other military spouses, who have put their careers on hold due to their husbands’ frequent military moves. So when she heard of MyCAA, she was excited that she could finish a psychology degree, using an online university. By taking courses online, she didn’t have to worry about dropping out of school.
When the funding changes were announced, Siekman still had $3,600 left of the $6,000 MyCAA account. She knew she’d lose the grant, because her husband was a Captain. But she found a loophole.
“To use the total $6,000, I would have had to take 12 classes. With the way they adjusted it, they said that from Sept. 1 to Oct. 21, we could apply for classes that would go through January. I figured out I could take four classes now and go four weeks in January. The classes will be paid for,” Siekman says. “I’m absolutely killing myself to get the classes in, but my MyCAA account will be used.”
She’ll still have 11 classes to go at a cost of $5,000, but this was expected when she first accepted the funding. She notes, however, that had she not discovered the loophole, she would have been in a dire situation.
“I am unemployed. I lost my job almost 17 months ago in the worst economy. The one bright light was that I could go back to school and finish my degree and not worry about paying for it. I don’t have the money, I lost my job, and there are so many more in the same circumstance. Until I figured out how to make the system work for me, I wasn’t sure I could take classes.”
Republished with permission of Military Officers Association of America. Copyright MOAA and Heidi Rafferty.