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Opinion

VSO enriches UH landscape

Allen Grundy
Guest Columnist 

I am a retired Vietnam-era veteran with 22 years of service, with a combination of service in the Air Force and Army National Guard. I have served in the position of Program Coordinator of the Veterans Services' Office (VSO) at the University of Houston for 11 months and 19 days. 

Since I have taken this position, I have been amazed at the steps our university is taking, not only supporting our troops returning from this war, but to assist their transition to civilian life through academic opportunities and a healing of the soul through the Veterans Oral History project, where the veteran gets to talk about his combat experience. 

Presently, the state of Texas has the second highest veteran population (second to California) in the US. With a population of approximately 1.8 million veterans in the state, separations are projected to increase slightly between 2001 and 2006 due to projected separations from the military among those who served during the Gulf War era. We intend to help today as we have always done in the past.

In the past, UH played an important part in the United States' effort during WWII. 

Among its many contributions, the institution housed the first naval school established in a college, training more than 5,000 navy personnel and several hundred Army and Navy pilots. Just as UH contributed to the war effort, following the war it contributed to the education of thousands of the nation's returning servicemen and women to take advantage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944-GI Bill of Rights. (If anyone wanted to have more info on the history of UH and veterans during the 1940s and 50s, there is a collection at the Special Collections & Archives in the University of Houston Library System.)

Today at the University, there are new programs and exciting plans for expanding services to today's worthy veterans. Presently, we are the only and the largest VSO office of its kind in the Texas higher education system that has its own unit not attached to a registrar's office or admission office. There is free copying, faxing and local phone calls at the veterans' disposal, and a cadre of computers wait for veterans to access the Internet. 

Programs and social camaraderie gatherings are always the highlight of this office each semester. One of our new programs with the education department in cooperation with the VSO are free GED classes with stipends and complimentary Metro tokens for eligible veterans who are sons and daughter of migrant /seasonal farm workers. To get better at what we do and where we do it, this past fiscal year, Student Fees Advisory Committee brought new life to the veteran's services office with a $20,000 expansion of funding to increase computer space, private counseling rooms and, most important, becoming fully American with Disabilities Act compliant for our returning disabled veterans.

Our hopes are to bring the University a "Headquarters" status for the veterans GI Bill, as it was referred to in the 1940s by then-director Dr. Kemmerer, the former head of the VSO at UH. We are now pushed by our new "Operation Boots to Books" for the returning veterans in a proactive recruiting mode that will help not only the VSO and the returning veterans, but the University enrollment numbers as well. 

We at the Veterans Services Office say, "Thank you, University of Houston."

Grundy, a guest columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu