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A failing foundation

Catie Hunter is 11 years old. Her father, an Army platoon sergeant, has spent five of those years away from her, serving in South Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan.

At her elementary school on Fort Sill, Okla., ceiling tiles are removed so that when a Great Plains storm rumbles in, rain can cascade from the rotting roof into large trash cans underneath. To get to class, Catie must dodge what she calls “Niagara Falls.”

Each day, the fifth-grader walks beneath the tiles, bent and browned, some dangling by threads of glue. Signs of disrepair abound: chipped floors, termite-infested walls, finger-size cracks along brick halls. A bucket, strapped by a bungee cord, hangs over the gym door — another makeshift fix for leaks.

“Sometimes, I wonder if it’s going to fall in,” she said.

Catie’s schoolhouse, built before Gen. Dwight Eisenhower ran for president, is on Fort Sill property, although it is operated and funded by the Lawton Public Schools district.

It is not the only one in poor shape. Tens of thousands of children attend schools on military bases that are falling apart from age and neglect, and fail to meet the military’s own standards. Some have tainted water and fouled air; others are so overcrowded that teachers improvise, holding class in hallways, supply closets, and in one instance, working in a boiler room.

Outdated? One school in Germany was built by the Nazis.

The strains only add to the emotional pressures on children of U.S. service members after 10 years of war and long, frequent absences. The average military parent is deployed three times. Stresses on families routinely bubble up in the schools.

At Catie’s Geronimo Road school, students have burst into tears after getting a phone call from Iraq. Or screamed, “I want to kill you!” Or picked up a desk and thrown it across the floor.

Catie has been separated from her father four times since birth. “I miss him a lot,” she said.

Her 16-year-old sister, Amanda, an honor roll student, got her first “F” shortly after the start of her father’s latest deployment.

Military mothers and fathers might have expected schools with better conditions.

“I would feel disrespected if I were on my second or third tour of duty and my kids were in a school that was dilapidated and too small or falling apart … there are a lot of serious problems,” said former Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, who chaired a House panel on military construction appropriations before losing a re-election bid last year.

A broken promise

The 1978 Defense Dependents’ Education Act requires the military to provide “academic services of a high quality” to the children of troops on active duty.

A 1988 Defense Department directive goes further, broadly guaranteeing military families “a quality of life that reflects the high standards and pride of the nation they defend” — including education.

Such assurances are undercut by an array of substandard conditions at many of the 353 schools for military children around the world — about 55 percent of them operated by the Defense Department.

Three-quarters of the 194 DoD-run schools on installations are either beyond repair or would require extensive renovation to meet minimum standards for safety, quality, accessibility and design, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News has found.

Those schools do not meet the military’s own expectations, and — for lack of money from Washington — aren’t likely to improve greatly any time soon.

Other priorities — including war spending of about $2 billion per week — have overshadowed the needs of students from military families. All told, the mounting number of fixes and new schools would cost nearly $4 billion, about the same amount being spent this year on unmanned aircraft.

Where military children go to school depends on circumstances often beyond families’ control. Some families that live on military installations send their children to one of 194 base schools operated by the Pentagon around the world, or one of 159 schools on stateside installations operated by local school districts.

These students — about 150,000 in all — attend schools with significant structural deficiencies. Many buildings are nearly a half-century old.

The Pentagon has placed 39 percent of its 194 schools in the worst category of “failing,” which means it costs more to renovate than replace them, reports to Congress show. Another 37 percent are in “poor” physical shape, which could require either replacement or expensive renovations to meet standards.

Schools run by public systems on Army installations don’t fare much better: 39 percent fall in those bottom two categories, according to a 2010 report.

A Defense Department task force is evaluating the 159 military base schools operated by local public systems. Only nine months into its work, the task force already has found signs of a larger problem; summaries of preliminary assessments of 15 schools shared with iWatch News leave little room for doubt about the conditions.

The summary for Geronimo Road, for instance, notes that it is in “failing condition” and “should be considered for replacement.”

The Pentagon declined to provide a copy of its assessments for all 159 schools.

The Department of Defense Education Activity acknowledged in a written response to questions that it “cannot keep pace with the types of renovations and maintenance needed when a school building goes beyond its useful life and the age of the building becomes a barrier to using these dollars wisely.”

Similarly, local school districts pay for renovation, construction and operation of their schools on domestic military installations — and their funding also is crimped.

Makeshift classrooms

In Quantico, Va., 30 miles from Washington, D.C., students at the DoD-operated Russell Elementary School tolerate old air units, busted water pipes, and only one handicapped-accessible bathroom — too small for some disabled children to navigate in their wheelchairs.

In adjacent Prince William County, one of the country’s more affluent suburban areas, schools are more modern. Over the past decade alone, the local district has built 26 new schools.

It’s an example of the frequent inequities between the schools of military children and the nearby schools of everyone else.

“Some of the new schools in town make our schools look like a prison,” said David Primer, who uses a 1980s-era trailer at Marine Corps Base Quantico to teach German classes. Storms are noisy affairs that jostle temporary classrooms.

Two miles outside Stuttgart, Germany, on the Army post Panzer Kaserne, children of U.S. soldiers attend Boeblingen Elementary School — built 73 years ago by the Nazis and used as a barracks by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tankers. The school building, the military’s oldest, is ill-equipped for modern education.

Younger students stay on the first of its four floors and are consigned to trailers when classrooms fill up. Older students tolerate tiny classrooms with tiny windows on the third floor, where their desks are crammed side by side or shoved into corners. Some modifications — such as adding fire escapes — took place only after the school was cited in 2006 for nine fire safety violations.

Conditions at other schools border on hazardous. At Fort Stewart, Ga., two of the three DoD-run elementary schools are beset by poor indoor air quality. Mold has grown on walls, sprouted through floors, and stained vents. Complaints have persisted for a decade despite inspections, tests and fixes involving a costly cast of architects, industrial hygienists, microbiologists and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

DoDEA officials said “none of our schools is unsafe and no school is a hazard to anyone.”

Administrators tend to portray their schoolhouses as “well worn” yet maintained. Robert Gordon, the top family policy official, said the Pentagon has taken steps recently to address deficiencies — creating the task force to survey base schools, evaluating the quality of education, and finding money to replace aging schools over the next five to seven years.

But the goal would require appropriations from a Congress wary of new spending.

DoD’s primary mission, of course, involves national security, not schooling kids. Weapons, wars and other budget priorities tend to overshadow needs on the home front. Public schools, which educate nine out of 10 military children, often on military installations, also have had trouble finding the dollars to replace and repair foundering infrastructure. This fiscal year, Congress allotted $750 million to fix some of the base schools’ shortcomings — a fraction of the need.

Local districts’ roles

Each year, the government spends another relatively small amount, $30 million, on “impact aid” for public schools that hold large numbers of students with parents in the military. But that money is spread among more than 120 school districts and doesn’t always trickle down.

Some schools have spent the money on counseling and special education that benefits military children, but others have made general purchases. In Minot, N.D., for instance, the money has gone for new copy machines and paving parking lots. The federal government gives districts wide latitude to use the money.

In Kansas, every school district, even those without military students, is entitled to some money. That leaves the system serving Fort Riley, for example, with only $3 million of the $12 million it is entitled to — hardly enough to build new schools, and most of it going toward $2 million in annual routine maintenance.

“It would take a lot of time to save for a new elementary school,” said Ron Walker, the Geary County superintendent.

Taxpayers are wont to front money for new schools, creating haves and have-nots — with military students being the have-nots. In Junction City, Kan., for instance, voters in 2006 approved spending $33 million to address overcrowding. It was the first such bond in the community for five decades, enough to build two new schools.

The support has yet to extend to Fort Riley’s schools. “The local taxpayer says, ‘Why should we fix or build new schools there?’” said Charles Volland, Geary County school’s communications director.

Kate Sullivan, whose two youngest sons attend Geronimo Road, bristles at the rejection by Lawton, Okla., residents in 2009 of a $13 million bond to fix that school. The decision forced the district to collect half through a sales tax.

“Finger pointing” broke out between the local community and the federal government, she said.

Ralston, school liaison officer at Fort Sill, summed up the debate over schools caught in the jurisdictional no man’s land: “People in Lawton have said, ‘Hey, those schools are Fort Sill’s,’ and Fort Sill has said, ‘Hey, they’re not our schools.’”

Friends in high places

At a May 19 groundbreaking ceremony for a new elementary school on Fort Riley, outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates reminded the crowd of a commitment he made a year earlier when noticing “the very unfortunate and bad situations here.”

The Army transferred $29 million from its coffers for the new school. “Today,” said Gates, “I deliver on that commitment.”

Last August, Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., added $250 million into military spending in 2011 “to address capacity or facility condition deficiencies” at base schools run by local public systems, which Congress passed in April.

Among the potential beneficiaries: schools in his district, on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which he described as having “deplorable” conditions.

Six of the base’s seven schools are a half-century old, fail to meet building codes and face overcrowding. The district stands to collect $150 million of the congressional funds.

Another beneficiary could be Geronimo Road, now scheduled for replacement before 2016. Army Undersecretary Joseph Westphal visited May 7, pledging “to help rebuild our schools on this installation.”

DoD’s Gordon, for his part, said the task force evaluating base schools is looking “to ensure a way ahead to allow us to get to those schools in dire need now.”

As for the plan to fix the military’s schools, he added, “we’ve got quite a commitment and, right now, our plan is to execute on that plan.”

For many military children like 11-year-old Catie Hunter, such help would come too late. The fifth-grader will be in eighth grade by 2014, the earliest date for fixes to her school.

At the moment, Catie has two wishes — that her dad returns home safely, and that her school remains “still standing.”

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iWatch News Data editor David Donald, freelancer Jenny Hoff, and researchers Julian Hattem and Devorah Adler also contributed to this story. A version of this story appeared in Newsweek magazine.