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Local College Helps Vets Make The Transition From The Battlefield To The Classroom

By Pat Loeb

MONTGOMERY COUNTY (CBS)  --  Chris Crouthamel didn't expect to be here, a second semester engineering student at Montgomery County Community College.

After being discharged from the Army, he says, "I thought, 'I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to college, I'm going to work'."

But Crouthamel is not only doing well in his classes, he's become a leader, president of the Student Veterans Organization and he credits the support he's received from the college's multi-pronged services for vets.

"They have been through a very intense experience and the feeling, initially, that I hear from a lot of people is 'I don't fit in here, I don't belong here,'" says psychology professor Anne Marie Donohue, a member of the Veterans Support Team, which works to turn that thinking around.

The Team is a group of faculty and staff that formed in 2007, as the number of returning veterans enrolling at the Blue Bell campus began to grow.

The number of vets on campus has doubled since then, to over 400, part of a national trend that has seen more than one-million veterans enter college in the last four years.

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Joe Long (left) and Chris Crouthmel in the Vet resource center Photo Credit (Pat Loeb)

The first problem the Team confronted was confusion over tuition benefits.

"There's not one G. I. bill. There are different chapters through the G.I. Bill, there are benefits through the National Guard, through the state," says Donohue. "So we just got everybody together who works with the veterans and their benefits and tried to be sure everybody's on the same page. And that's been very successful. The veterans know who they can call if there's an issue."

The group also tries to help with more ephemeral issues-- the feeling of alienation Donohue described and more subtle discomforts: feeling confounded by decision-making after the structured military life and an unwillingness to ask for help.

A key asset has been the Veterans Resource Center, a former farmhouse converted to a combination office, meeting space and hang-out center.

Donohue calls it "a place where they know they're welcome, they know they can talk to people about what their needs are and what they're going through."

"This definitely helps," said Crouthamel, as he sat in the Resource Center one recent afternoon with Joe Long, an Air Force vet and vice-president of the SVO.

Long agreed. "With this help and structure, it's phenomenal. The assistance that I've been getting and I'm doing very well with my classes and it has to do a lot with the support that we have here."

The school also, this fall, hired Justin Machain, a former Marine, to be a full-time Veteran Affairs coordinator, to help veteran-students navigate financial aid, academics, community involvement and connecting with one another.

"It's one of the jobs I've had since I left the marine corps that I can actually, when I lay my head down at night, really feel good about," he says, "even if it was one student that day that I really connected with and really kind of helped them feel more comfortable and at ease."

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