October 18th - I am SO excited for you!

I got a work email the other day from a really good friend and collegue and she asked me to pull data on how many military students we have in our school district. We don't record this information, so unfortuantely, I was not able to do this for her. We do have an Army National Guard base by us, but it's a few cities over, and I would assume the kids would attend the schools much closer to them, than here. It'd be about a 35 minute drive, so I made the assumption that even though we have around 9,000 students in our district, we probably wouldn't have too many based on the commute alone.

Anyways, my coworker, S, was contacted by someone (I'll call her T) at the MI National Guard offices and asked if we would like her and another woman to come into our schools and "brief us on resources available to military children and youth, and how school staff can support military families they work with." S forwarded me the email and asked me how many students we have that have a parent in the military, which I wasn't able to give her. S wrote T back and said we don't record that information, but said that she would still like to meet with her, but doesn't want to waste T's time if we don't have a significant amount of military children in our school district. She then asked T if she had a way of knowing how many students of military members attended our district. T wrote back that she doesn't have the numbers broken down by individual school districts, but there are about 600 students in our county. This number is actually much more than I expected; the MI National Guard base is in the next county over, so I didn't think we'd have too many.

Either way, when S first asked me for the numbers, I told her that if she were to meet with T that I would definitely be interested in meeting with her also. We have a meeting set up on the afternoon of October 18th and I am SOOO excited for it! Maybe I can meet some people in my area who know what it's like to be in my position!!! I live in a very civilian oriented community and I've looked online for support groups, but I've not found any in my area. So hopefully this will bring me at least a friend or two who I can hang out with, while our fiances/husbands are deployed!!

I CAN'T WAIT!!!