(this will be a long, rambling post... so I'll just apologize in advance).
This is one of our local Soldiers & his family being spoken about in the article.
Seeing the effect that the back-to-back deployments (some have just returned from their third trip to Iraq since 2003) has on these kids is heartbreaking... and wonderful at the same time (I know, that's wierd, but true). They have shown more resilience through extreme hardship than many adults will have to endure during an entire lifetime. And through that time, many show more grace than I've ever seen. But it's through the constant bombardment of stress that these children are growing. Some deal with it much better than others.
The "previous arrangement" for phone calls that they're speaking of is this:
if a parent calls from Iraq (or Afghanistan), they call to the office, and then the child goes to the office to take the call. It is indeed true that sometimes the Soldiers only call for a few seconds... if they're calling from their cell phones, often the calls crap out...
The family here is saying that it would be too long of a wait, and too cumbersome for the call to be placed on hold in the office while the child comes up there to answer after being paged. So in spite of the "previous arrangement" (which is for all children which have a deployed parent, not just the family in question), this particular family chose to disregard that and send their child to school with the cell phone to accept calls.
The schools around this particular area described have done outstanding things for these kids (especially regarding counseling, and attentiveness to the increase in stress on these kids). It's sort of painting a one-sided picture in all of the news articles that I've seen. This school district (and several others in the immediate surrounding areas) are staunch, staunch, staunch supporters of our military service members. The schools have shown over and over their support of the soldiers here through direct support to the children which attend their schools.
I am sure that the "what if that's the last time I get to talk to him" question was out there, but I can't find the particular article I saw that at. Frankly, it's possible for them to think that every single day that their parent is gone, and it will actually be the case for some of these families. Many (too numerous to count) of the local families are living this reality for the third time in 5 years. These children have seen the white government vans full of Soldiers bearing bad news driving through their own neighborhood streets; and they stop breathing until after the van passes to continue on to another family. Then they cry and feel ashamed at having felt relief, almost joy, that it was someone else's Dad who died instead of their own. This is the reality that these children are living. And it can be, indeed, almost a complete emotional drain for them.
Will a call from their parent during school hours help children who are having a particularly difficult time? Probably. But if their emotional need is that great, they probably need a hell of a lot more than a phone call.
So, my final opinion:
I haven't decided if I'm for or against the cell phone calls from a deployed parent. My heart strings say yes, let them have the call. My head says they still have morning & evening calls, which probably get so frequent that they run out of things to say to one another after about 30 seconds & pass the phone off to the next family member.
