Program gives students outlet when mom, dad are sent to war

When Rosa Rector was pulled into a parent-teacher conference last fall to explain why her two daughters had missed so much school, she gave a straight answer.

“They wanted to know why,” Rector, 39, said. “I told them why.”

Her children weren’t sick. They hadn’t skipped school simply to get out of class. They just needed time away from their DeSoto Middle School classmates to face the emotional tidal wave that hit their household in August when their father was called away to serve in the Iraq war.

“They had missed quite a bit of school because their dad was leaving,” Rector said. “They wanted to spend some time with him before he left.”

Her oldest daughter, Elizabeth, 14, took it especially hard. Her youngest, Kayla, 13, clammed up and mostly kept to herself, said Rector, who also has an 18-year-old son.

The DeSoto County family was not alone.

Impacts from the Iraq war had rippled throughout Southwest Florida, from which the Florida National Guard had been deployed at the start of the 2005 school year. More than 20 students at DeSoto Middle School had a family member or parent being sent to Iraq.

Rector suggested the school have an assistance program in place to help students with family serving in a war that was plastered across their television screens every day.

This time, it was the school that had an answer.

Jennifer Holtzendorf, a 27-year-old Florida Gulf Coast University graduate student working in the school counselor’s office, was developing a program to help students just like Elizabeth and Kayla Rector.

Holtzendorf had grown up in DeSoto County schools and enrolled at FGCU three years ago to earn a bachelor’s degree in human services. She went on to work toward a master’s degree in social work.

During an internship with the TideWell Hospice in Arcadia last year, Holtzendorf studied bereavement counseling and went to work at DeSoto Middle School. It was there that she carried out a project that completed her graduate degree requirements and helped students cope with the Iraq war at the same time.

“There was a need in the community,” Holtzendorf said.

The student support group was initiated in January.

During the course of three months, a group of five students, ages 12 to 14, met every Wednesday to discuss the one thing that made them different from the rest of the sixth- and seventh-graders that walked the hallways of DeSoto Middle School.

“It helped them to realize that there are kids in the same situation as them,” said Jane Mooney, a guidance counselor who has been with the school since 1992.

Several students didn’t have computers in their homes. Holtzendorf set up Internet stations in the school library and showed them how to get in touch with their loved ones overseas through e-mail, Mooney said.

Holtzendorf also educated students about customs in traditions in the Middle East and encouraged them to talk about what it was like to live without relatives who had been pulled to a battle zone thousands of miles away.

“A lot of times they get angry or frustrated because a loved one is not there,” Holtzendorf said. “We got a lot of that. We discussed how it would be for them if that loved one didn’t come home.”

The sessions helped relieve the stress that weighed heavy on the Rector family, where three children missed their father. The reality of the Iraq war hit closer when Rector’s only son, Mark, enlisted in the Army National Guard last year.

“They really wanted to talk about it and deal with it,” Rector said. “It helped them a lot. They weren’t as depressed.”

The student support group conducted its final session in April, the same month Holtzendorf graduated from FGCU. She married last week and has been transferred to Port Charlotte, where she’ll continue her work in counseling.

Mooney said she will continue the student support group next year if there’s still a need for it. Similar programs weren’t in place during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s.

“I think this one is a little different in that they’re pulling in the National Guard and we have a lot of people in the National Guard,” Mooney said. “The kids who are serving over there are kids who grew up here. We’re a small town.”