Student soldiers, dressed in their U.S. Army fatigues, walked between buildings at the National Guard's Lavern E. Weber Professional Education Center last week, going from one course to another and grabbing lunch at the campus cafeteria.
On the edge of the 85-acre, 35-building campus, students went in and out of a dorm-style hotel, where many of them stay for the weeks or months they're at the school.
More than 20,000 service members each year travel from all 50 states and four territories to attend the Professional Education Center at Camp Joseph T. Robinson in North Little Rock to receive noncombat specialized training for their jobs in the Army or Air National Guard.
Now, the school is entering into new partnerships with universities that its leaders say will streamline the process for students to turn their experiences into college degrees and civilian occupations.
The Professional Education Center recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Charleston in West Virginia, and it is expecting to soon sign a similar agreement with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The school is also reaching out to other colleges and universities.
"We'd like to get our soldiers more opportunities for education," said Gene O'Nale, chief of staff of the Professional Education Center. "The goal is, on top of the training you get here, that training helps you get college credit. It jump-starts you onto a college degree."
The Professional Education Center is divided into six training centers, each focusing on a certain field, such as human resources or information technology.
Through the University of Charleston, the soldiers and airmen can receive credit for the courses they take at the Professional Education Center, and they have the opportunity to enroll in the university's bachelor's, master's or doctoral programs that pertain to that area of study.
The university opened an office at Camp Robinson in April and hired Michael Biggs, an education adviser, to staff it. An agreement was signed between the two institutions at the end of May.
UALR, designated by the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, will be working mostly with the Professional Education Center's new cyber program, which is still being developed, O'Nale said.
The National Guard started planning for the 10-week cyber program in November, and the first full class will be in early 2016. It will be the school's seventh training center, O'Nale said, and will be offered to both reserve and active-duty service members from all branches of the armed forces.
When service members complete the program, UALR wants to be able to offer them certifications, said Kathy Oliverio, UALR's military ombudsman.
"In the military, we do a very good job of training and educating our folks," said Oliverio, who is retired from the U.S. Air Force. "Unfortunately, it doesn't count for much on the outside. What we want to do is try to get some sort of certification for them that they can have in hand. When they go into the civilian world, it can be a recognized certificate from an accredited university."
Both Oliverio and Biggs said veterans and service members frequently have problems when trying to transfer military experience into college credit. Some universities don't know how to apply military experience, they said, and there is not a uniform system for doing so.
"Honestly, I have to take time to read their military transcript, look at what they're majoring in and hand-select anything that will help them," Oliverio said.
Both also said that partnering with the Professional Education Center would ease the process -- as O'Nale intended.
According to the Veterans Benefits Administration's Annual Benefits Report that was updated in September, the number of people using educational benefits such as the Post-9/11 GI Bill has increased each year since it became effective in 2009. Nationwide, more than 1 million people used education benefits to go to college in 2013 -- a 93 percent increase from 2009, when there were approximately 560,000 beneficiaries.
However, O'Nale said, the National Guard's numbers are lagging.
"We're getting reports in at the National Guard level that the involvement in education is really low," he said. "There's money out there for them to get their degrees. This is us trying to make it easier for them."
Before signing on with the University of Charleston earlier this year, Biggs was unemployed. Until last year, he had worked for the National Guard's Education Support Center, which had also been housed at Camp Robinson and was closed because of a contractual problem, he said.
There, he would receive calls from guardsmen located all over the world who were seeking help on how to obtain higher education.
Now, at his new office at the National Guard base, he again has the opportunity to sit down with guardsmen, get to know them and help them start on a path toward a degree. As of Tuesday, he had enrolled 17 soldiers and airmen into the University of Charleston's programs.
"There are soldiers who have been working on getting that degree for 10 years with two or three deployments between, babies getting born. It's amazing how life gets in the way of all these plans that you make," Biggs said. "I had a soldier tell me one time, 'You got me excited again. I thought I'd never get this done.'
"We found a college that gave him significant credit for his military experience, and he was thinking it would never happen. That's why we do what we do."
Metro on 06/08/2015