The failure of troops to provide phone numbers for spouses in the Air Force Personnel Accountability and Assessment System, however, can carry dire consequences. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Scheiss recalled an incident in which he and his wife, Debbie, needed to reach a spouse whose husband had died in Syria.

But when they called the number on file, the phone simply rang and rang. It was the number for the airman’s cell phone.

“The number we were calling [was wrong] because he didn’t want his wife’s number to be on something,” Scheiss said during a forum on military families at the Air & Space Forces Association annual conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Wednesday. “We are the most connected people in the world … but when the time is needed to contact people … don’t take away that ability for a spouse to be connected.”

The Air Force is launching an effort to improve the service’s ability to collect accurate contact information for spouses and provide it to units’ Key Support Program, the Air Force’s volunteer portion of a command’s family readiness efforts similar to Navy ombudsmen or Marine Corps family readiness volunteers.

Key Support Liaisons facilitate communications between commands and families — and often serve as the social foundation for military families when units are deployed.

Volunteers are required to keep phone numbers and other personal information confidential under the Privacy Act, but the unit phone trees they are provided are only as good as the information in AFPAAS, explained Cindy Wilsbach, wife of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach.

“We’ve asked them to do this and [Key Support Liaisons] have stood up and said they will, yet we haven’t equipped them by giving them the contact information for our families,” Cindy Wilsbach said.

“When this thing kicked off in February,” she said, referring to the Iran war, “I heard from people around the globe … ‘Cindy, their spouse is gone, and this spouse has heard from no one. No one has contacted her, no one has reached out to her.’ It wasn’t just one or two people. I heard it from a lot of people.”

The service has started distributing cards to unit leaders that explain how leaders — most likely unit first sergeants — can pull unit personnel lists from AFPAAS and provide a comprehensive recall roster to their Key Support Liaison.

The four-step effort involves identifying the need, collecting the contact information, maintaining a roster and providing it to the liaison on a regular basis.

The cards were created by Doniel Wolfe, a military family life counselor who holds a doctorate in counseling and is married to Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Wolfe.

Collecting and distributing accurate information on family contacts may sound simple, but it’s been a problem “for a very long time,” Cindy Wilsbach said.

“We’ve heard it at every single base we’ve visited … so we’re hoping, with Legal’s blessing, that this is the way forward, that we will arm KSLs with the power to actually do what we’ve asked them to do,” she said.

Connection with the command, as well as one another, is a cornerstone of readiness, Cindy Wilsbach added. She said the liaisons are a vital resource for making initial contact with new families, sustaining families when units are deployed and providing support in emergencies.

The senior leaders and their spouses urged personnel attending the conference to keep their spouses’ contact information updated in AFPAAS, with Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna saying it’s the responsibility of leadership to make sure that spouses feel included.

“How many spouses … are maybe just waiting for someone to reach out to them. The worst that could happen is you send a note or make a phone call, send a text or an email, and you don’t get an answer back … but this is where leadership comes in — you got in there, and you got to take care,” Bentivegna said.

A new GAO review found gaps at multiple stages of the Department of Defense Education Activity’s process for identifying and supporting students with specific learning disabilities, including screening, referrals, evaluations and instruction. GAO officials said those gaps can compound, affecting when students receive help and the quality of the services they receive.

“Those are gaps that, when you add them up, they multiply, and they have a compounding effect on when and the quality of services that students receive,” said Jennifer Gregory, a GAO assistant director who oversees part of the agency’s special education work.

About 5% of DODEA’s roughly 60,000 full-time K-12 students had an identified specific learning disability during the 2024-25 school year, and the number of students identified with such disabilities increased 29% from 2018-19 through 2024-25, according to the latest GAO report. About 10% of DODEA students received strategic instruction, which provides short-term, small-group academic support.

Specific learning disabilities include disorders such as dyslexia and dyscalculia that affect understanding language or performing mathematical calculations.

GAO examined DODEA schools in five of the agency’s nine districts, covering districts that serve 63% of DODEA students with identified specific learning disabilities. Investigators visited 11 schools and conducted 47 group interviews with teachers, administrators and other stakeholders. They also administered an opt-in online questionnaire to parents of DODEA students with specific learning disabilities.

Among the parents who responded to GAO’s questionnaire, 82 of 121 said the limited availability of DODEA resources to assess students, such as screening tools, was a challenge.

GAO found that at nine of the 11 schools, staff said they needed more or better screening tools to identify students who may need additional literacy or math support or special education. DODEA’s screening tools did not directly assess foundational phonics skills among elementary school students and were not available to all students.

GAO said those limitations make it difficult to identify students who are behind for their grade level, which is particularly important given DODEA’s highly mobile population. DODEA officials told GAO in July that the agency had procured universal screening tools for all grades and planned to begin administering them in late 2026.

GAO also found that DODEA cannot currently ensure that all students identified as needing additional literacy or math support to meet grade-level expectations receive the appropriate support.

At the high school level, some of that assistance is provided through strategic instruction classes, which are electives, according to GAO. That means a student identified as needing additional help may not necessarily receive it, said Jacqueline Nowicki, the GAO director who oversees the agency’s K-12 education work.

“Once it is determined that a kiddo does need support, there is not a way right now that DODEA can ensure that kids who have been identified for this kind of support actually get it,” Nowicki said.

GAO recommended that DODEA ensure all students identified as eligible for additional literacy or math support receive the necessary instruction. The recommendation remains open.

The review also found problems with referrals and evaluations.

GAO recommended that DODEA analyze why Student Support Teams reject referrals for students who may benefit from additional literacy and math support and identify special-education referrals rejected because of poor-quality or incomplete information.

In the 2024-25 school year, DODEA reported that 12% of special-education evaluations were not completed promptly, according to GAO. Ten of the 11 schools GAO visited identified timely identification and evaluation as a challenge. GAO recommended that DODEA analyze factors within its control that contribute to delays in the evaluation process.

At all 11 schools GAO visited, staff cited obstacles to helping students meet literacy and math goals, including limited access to student data and professional learning that did not always align with teachers’ roles. Of 44 strategic-instruction and special education teachers interviewed by GAO, 32 rated their professional-learning opportunities as “bad” or “very bad.”

Teachers were routinely asked to evaluate training they had already received but did not have a clearly understood opportunity to identify the training they needed going forward, Nowicki said.

GAO also found that teachers did not always receive the professional learning needed to use DODEA’s specialized reading interventions as intended.

GAO did not formally audit the transfer of individualized education programs during permanent changes of station as part of this review. But Nowicki said the issue has repeatedly surfaced in GAO’s broader work with DODEA and military families.

Parents have told GAO that records sometimes did not arrive at a child’s new school. Other parents said they hand-carried records but were unsure where to deliver them, she said. GAO has also heard from parents who said receiving schools did not immediately implement an existing IEP.

Nowicki said missing or delayed records can delay services or leave educators trying to reconstruct a child’s needs and prior services.

“It is not uncommon for parents to tell us, you know, I transferred to DODEA School from ABC Public School. My files didn’t show up,” Nowicki said. “Or my files I brought them with me and hand carried them and didn’t know who or couldn’t find who to give them to.”

School liaison officers can help military families coordinate so-called “warm handoffs” between schools, Nowicki said. But not every school has a liaison officer, and some parents do not know the service is available.

The latest review contains eight recommendations to the Defense Department, addressing screening, referrals, evaluation delays, teacher training and access to student data, as well as ensuring students identified as needing additional literacy or math support actually receive it.

It isn’t a deployment. For the Thomas family, it’s simply military life. For generations, military families were expected to pack up together every time orders arrived. Today, some families are making a different calculation.

Rather than uprooting children’s schools, abandoning established careers, leaving specialized medical care or disrupting custody arrangements, they are maintaining separate households while remaining married, a practice military families often call “geo-baching,” short for geographic bachelorhood.

“Well, you made this choice”

Thomas never imagined living hundreds of miles from her husband. Friends often assume deployments are the hardest part of military life. She disagrees. “To the outside world, you’re still married, your spouse is safe and life appears normal,” Thomas said. “For most we hear, ‘Well, you made this choice,’ but normal is not the word I would use to describe raising children, maintaining a home, nurturing a marriage and carrying the weight of everyday life from different states.”

For Thomas, remaining in Florida preserved two careers, her children’s routines and the support system the family had built.

As Thomas began sharing her family’s experience, military spouses from every service branch reached out with similar stories. Some remained behind to preserve careers or children’s educational stability. Others stayed because of specialized medical care, or support networks.

Those conversations led Thomas to found Family in Flight, a nonprofit that provides peer support, resources and travel assistance to geographically separated military families. She said the organization has connected with hundreds of spouses navigating long-distance marriages shaped not by deployment, but by military life itself.

Jeanne Caruso wanted nothing more than to accompany her husband to his assignment in Okinawa. Instead, she remained in the United States because the specialized care she relies on to manage epilepsy would not be available there. Moving overseas, she said, could place her health at significant risk.

For Navy spouse Tiffany Nguyen, the decision centered on her son. The family was preparing for an overseas move when they learned their child had been deemed unsuitable for permanent change of station by DoDEA based on his Individualized Education Program. Nguyen said she is challenging the determination, arguing that it contains significant discrepancies. She said the family was told schools overseas would be unable to meet her son’s educational needs.

The circumstances differ. The outcome does not. Each family found itself weighing military orders against another responsibility they were unwilling or unable to leave behind.

Although the Defense Department does not track voluntary geographic separation among married service members, Blue Star Families has documented the practice before. In its 2015 Military Family Lifestyle Survey, one in five active-duty family respondents reported choosing geographic bachelorhood at least once during their military career. The most common reasons were a spouse’s career, short military assignments and children’s education.

More recent Blue Star Families research no longer measures geographic bachelorhood specifically, but many of the pressures remain. The organization’s 2025 Military Family Lifestyle Survey identified military spouse employment, military pay, time away from family and dependent children’s education among the leading quality-of-life concerns for active-duty families. Nearly seven in 10 respondents said two incomes were essential to their family’s financial well-being.

A different kind of separation

From the outside, geographic separation can look manageable. Children still go to school. Service members remain stateside. There are no deployment ceremonies or homecomings marking the separation on the immediate calendar.

Inside those households, spouses describe something very different. Thomas handled school pickups, doctor’s appointments, home repairs, sports schedules and sick days without her husband physically present. Parenting conversations happened by phone. Milestones unfolded over video calls.

“It looked like sitting alone at night after the kids were in bed and realizing there was no one else in the house to share the day with,” she said.

Deployment brings family readiness groups, organized community support and a shared understanding that the separation is temporary. Geographic separation often does not.

“When a service member deploys, people understand the sacrifice,” Thomas said. “There are support groups, resources and conversations surrounding that experience. Geo-baching often exists in the shadows.”

A category that doesn’t officially exist

Military families have long navigated involuntary separations through deployments and unaccompanied overseas tours, where the Defense Department determines a service member cannot bring dependents because of mission requirements or host-nation restrictions.

Geographic bachelorhood is different.

Because the arrangement is generally voluntary, the Defense Department does not recognize “geo-bachelor” as an official personnel status or maintain department-wide data on how many families live this way. Married service members who voluntarily relocate without their dependents are generally governed by existing housing and installation policies rather than a separate geo-bachelor program.

Thomas said she still believes her family made the right decision, even though it came at a cost. “We were grateful for the opportunity, the career and that we still had each other through all of that,” she said. “Both realities can exist at once and that is OK.”

“New Mexicans who have been affected by these exposures deserve compensation and they deserve to get that compensation free from bad actors attempting to take advantage of them,” Lopez said in a release shortly after a major expansion and extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was signed into law on July 4, 2025.

The measure finally included the New Mexico “Downwinders” from the Trinity blast and their surviving families who were excluded from coverage when RECA initially passed in 1990. Previously, it covered only specific counties in Nevada, Arizona and Utah, which had been exposed to fallout from the more than 900 atomic tests, including 100 above ground, at the Nevada test range between January 1951 and September 1992.

The government at the time claimed there was insufficient data on the impacts of the fallout from the Trinity test to include New Mexico in the coverage.

When the new RECA bill passed last year as part of President Donald Trump’s “one big beautiful” tax-cutting bill, it was the first time in 80 years since the Trinity blast that the government acknowledged New Mexicans were entitled to federal assistance.

At a virtual news conference Tuesday, two days before the 81^st anniversary of the Trinity blast, advocates for expanding and extending the current RECA Act, which is set to sunset in 2028, also warned again of the continuing attempts by scam artists to steal compensation from the victims.

Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., said the long-awaited compensation for the Downwinders had also “opened the door to rampant fraud,” and he urged those eligible for the $100,000 to guard against “bad actors in our community.”

Vasquez also called for the current RECA act to be extended for another 15 years past the 2028 deadline to ensure all victims are compensated.

He urged that the compensation be increased from $100,000 to $150,000.

Even before claims under the new RECA Act could be filed, scammers allegedly were at work last July at a booth at the Eastern Navajo Fair in Crown Point, New Mexico. The booth boasted of assistance in filing claims, according to Maggie Billman, a member of the Sawmill Warriors group advocating for radiation survivors of the Navajo nation.

Billman told Native News Online that she was alarmed by the supposedly official claims forms attendants at the booth were handing out. The forms asked for Social Security Numbers, phone numbers and the hospital where treatment was given.

“I looked at the woman and I said, ‘This is not RECA. Why don’t you give me your business card, and I’ll be in touch? I know a lot about this bill.’ That’s when they stopped talking to me, and I walked away,” Billman said.

Tina Cordova, a co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium advocacy group and a cancer survivor herself, was not surprised at Billman’s experience with the scammers. She added that she would continue to advocate for New Mexicans with illnesses that do not qualify for compensation under RECA.

“I think that it’s high time our government realizes that we are not going to stand for justice for some,” Cordova said. “We are in favor of justice for not just a few, but justice for the many, and we will continue to fight until we receive justice for all.”

Since RECA was enacted in 1990, the program has approved over 41,000 claims, totaling more than $2.6 billion to Downwinders, according to the Justice Department, which administers the program.

The virtual news conference came two days before the 81^st anniversary of the Trinity blast. In 1945, an eclectic group of scientists enrolled by physicist Robert Oppenheilmer to develop and detonate an atomic bomb gathered in the New Mexico desert to watch whether the thing they called “the gadget” would actually work and usher the world into the atomic age.

The plutonium bomb of about 19-21 kilotons went off at what was then called 5:59 a.m. Mountain War Time with a blinding light visible over a 160-mile radius. It sent up a fiery mushroom cloud hotter than the core of the sun, according to numerous accounts of that morning by the participants and others.

New Mexicans were told nothing. They were not warned before nor after the blast. The public was not told of the Trinity blast until the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war with Japan.

In the interim, the U.S. Army put out a not-to-worry release attributing the colossal blast and fallout to an ammo dump explosion: “Explosion of an ammunition magazine on the Alamogordo Air Base reservation this morning, heard and seen for many miles, was reported today by William O. Eareckson, commanding officer of the air base. There was no loss of life or injuries of persons, Earekson said.”

The Trinity site is now part of the Army’s White Sands Missile Range, which planned no ceremonies nor open house events to mark the anniversary.

The site is opened to the public only once a year in October, and visitors are warned against picking up any of the strange so-called “Trinitite” green and red rocks that were formed when desert sand was sucked up into the mushroom cloud and heated to a glass-like substance before falling back to earth.

The Trinitite still contains tiny traces of radiation. It’s against the law for visitors to try to take the rocks home as souvenirs.

It’s the standard that leaders cite, programs are built around and progress is measured against. But a recently published report reveals that the Department of Defense has been calculating unemployment differently from typical benchmarks, overstating unemployment rates and obscuring how many military spouses may have stopped looking for work entirely.

A March 2026 report revealed that the DoD calculates unemployment differently than the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, counting some spouses as unemployed who would typically be seen as out of the workforce.

The Pentagon attributes these differences to unique military lifestyle factors. However, according to economist and professor Amy Burnett Cross, this difference in calculation “makes these measures not comparable.”

In fact, if the Pentagon mirrored federal standards, the military spouse unemployment rate would drop from roughly 20% to 14% — still significantly higher than the national average, but lower than the figure cited for years in congressional testimony, policy discussions and news coverage.

Cross believes this “structurally inflates” military spouse unemployment while simultaneously reducing the number of spouses categorized as no longer participating in the workforce, a group rarely highlighted in DoD programming efforts and reports.

“I remember penny pinching so, so much in those days,” recalled Army spouse Elizabeth Mays of her husband’s first duty station in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. “I ended up taking a job making minimum wage at Sears in the shoe department, just to help us make ends meet.”

This was the first of many times Mays worked outside her field to remain employed. Subsequent duty stations yielded similar employment choices.

“Between commuting and then the workday, you’re spending 13 hours a day away from your newborn baby, and your husband is deployed and not even there at all. It’s just me,” said Mays.

She did the math and realized that after child care and transportation costs, her income wouldn’t cover her expenses. In fact, remaining in the workforce would “cost” her family $50 a week. “Those decisions did not make sense, and that was the point where I chose family.”

Mays’ experience is familiar to many military spouses, but it is an experience that is not well understood. Mays is not part of the roughly 20% of military spouses who are unemployed, those who are looking for work but not finding it. She is part of the roughly 36% of spouses who are not in the workforce at all.

“Anecdotally, I would say that we have a pretty large percentage of spouses that have removed themselves from the workforce,” said Eddy Mentzer, who oversaw child care family programs and spouse employment for the DoD. “They’re not captured in any way whatsoever.”

The lack of information on military spouses who have stopped looking for work may undercut the programs designed to help them.

Patricia Barron served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Military Community and Family Policy under President Biden from 2021 to 2025. Her office oversaw military spouse employment programming and collaborated with the Pentagon’s Office of People Analytics to survey military spouses.

“A question that I have always had to our researchers at DoD … ‘Are we asking the right questions?’” said Barron.

The answer she often received was that changing survey questions would hamper the department’s ability to track trends over time.

“There’s always, I would say, good reasoning for the pushback [to update surveys], but it keeps us stuck where we are,” she said. “There’s got to be a new way to think about the [spouse survey], and maybe it’s time to blow it up.”

For many military spouses, cycling in and out of the workforce is expected, even if it isn’t clearly documented or understood.

Upon discovering she was pregnant with their first child, Navy spouse Melinda Estrada made a plan to navigate her budding career in tech. She would work on her graduate degree while staying home with her new baby.

“And then once that’s done, then I’ll jump from my graduate degree, hopefully, to a full-time position,” said Estrada.

Because her husband’s assignment to attend school in Monterey, California, was only supposed to last 18 months, she didn’t see a point in looking for a job only to have to step away without the accrued work time required to be entitled to maternity leave.

A second child and increasing demands from her husband’s job delayed her graduate degree further, extending her time out of the workforce.

Mays, too, struggled to reenter the workforce.

“In Germany, I tried to go back to work,” said Mays, whose husband received overseas orders in 2014, moving her and her two children, ages two and four, far from family and friends.

Because there were limited jobs available overseas, she applied for a job outside her field, at a bank on the installation.

“They told me that they chose another candidate because they were going to be there longer than me,” she said.

Undeterred, she applied to work in merchandising at the Army Exchange and was hired after having to wait 15 months for her daughter to be old enough to be eligible for a spot in daycare.

“I came back from my first day on the job with training, and my husband said, ‘So, I have news.’ Our favorite phrase,” Mays recalled. “‘I have been selected for a job in D.C., and we have to move in 90 days.’”

Mays wanted to work, but resigned the following day, exiting the workforce.

Historically, DoD surveys have asked spouses if they “wanted to work.” As of 2019, the vast majority of those spouses, 85%, responded yes, but only 43% were employed.

This question was not included in the 2021 or 2024 surveys. However, recent DoD surveys have asked why spouses are not looking for work, allowing them to select only one answer. The Number 1 answer (30%) cited child care responsibilities.

Child care scarcity is a reality for all Americans, and military child care is no different.

According to a 2025 report by RAND, military child care programs are not keeping up with demand, leaving tens of thousands of military families without care.

The availability of affordable child care has a significant impact on military spouses’ participation in the workforce. According to a 2016 Health and Human Services report, a 10% reduction in the price of child care could increase maternal employment as high as 11%.

Despite the documented need for improved child care access, most military spouse employment solutions have focused on reducing unemployment through personal development and employment partnerships.

“The DoD has thrown money at trying to find employers who are willing to hire military spouses because people don’t want to hire people who are moving all the time,” said Maria Donnelly, the co-founder of the Military Family Foundation, a nonprofit that has helped military spouses navigate federal employment policies.

Donnelly was referring to one of the DoD’s employment solutions, the Military Spouse Employment Partnership, or MSEP, a membership-based program that encourages civilian employers to hire military spouses.

Since MSEP was launched in 2011, “more than 220,000 military spouses” have been hired. While the initiative requires its partners to document those they hire and retain, this data has not yet been publicly reported.

Both Estrada and Mays reported taking advantage of DoD-sponsored career development programs and internships. Neither walked away with jobs as a direct result of participating, but both formed networking connections that ultimately led to employment. For Estrada, another workforce departure followed.

In January 2026, the DoD announced an effort to reduce military spouse unemployment by 5%, increase Military Spouse Employment Partnership retention to 100% and establish a new military spouse unemployment office.

If experts are correct that the military is measuring unemployment differently than the rest of the country, it raises questions about whether current policies are targeting the right problem.

“I try not to should myself,” said Mays, who is currently employed by a military spouse-owned business that offers flexible remote work, a job she is thankful to have. “But I have this feeling and that I could and should be like at a director level or a management level, given my level of experience.”

Estrada is still looking for work.

The Military Spouse Small Business Recognition Act was influenced by the high unemployment rate for military spouses and the rate of spouses that are self-employed small business owners or are interested in entrepreneurship, according to a Thursday media round table.

“Spousal employment and financial stability are among the top factors for service member retention, and when military spouses can’t build businesses, that retention suffers and our war fighters suffer, and our national security posture suffers,” Eliza Levy, ELPR’s founder and CEO, said to reporters.

If passed, the act would waive Small Business Association loan fees up to $1 million; reduce equity injection requirements; designate military spouse-owned businesses as an 8(a) Disadvantages Category; and require the SBA to track military spouse participation in loan programs.

Patricia M. Barron, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Military Community and Family Policy, said to reporters that the biggest link between military spouse employment and military readiness is retention.

She highlighted how aspects of military life, such as frequent moving or career gaps, make it difficult to retain employment as a spouse.

Barron noted that after constant moves and unemployment, spouses and their military counterparts begin to think about leaving the force, especially if it makes more sense financially.

“If we want to keep this volunteer force, that retention piece is incredibly important,” said Barron. “And the Department of War and the Congress, they have made military spouse employment a mission readiness issue.”

“It is no longer just a quality of life issue, and that’s why it’s so important,” Barron continued.

Military spouses have an unemployment rate of around 22% according to a 2024 Department of Labor fact sheet — approximately five times higher than the national average, which sits at roughly 4.3% as of March.

In addition, 48% of military spouses are either self-employed or are interested in being, but a lack of access to capital is a barrier that this act hopes to remedy.

The act has not yet been introduced to Congress as the coalition is still gathering support from members. Stephanie Brown, CEO of the Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce that is leading the charge for the act, said they are hoping to announce the two co-sponsors of the bill by late Thursday.

If deemed the best way to propel this bill forward, the coalition intends to attach it to the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

Julia Bardsley felt a growing dread as she toured a day care just outside the gates of Fort Gordon, Georgia, with the nine-month-old son she had never even left with a babysitter on her mind.

Three infants cried from their cribs. One baby on the floor clutched a rattle, the only toy Bardsley could see in the room. Another had pulled herself up to a cabinet and was peeling off the laminate. In the corner, a television was tuned to Judge Judy.

Bardsley didn’t feel she had much of a choice when it came to child care; she was days away from starting her dream job, and wait lists for the child development center on post were two years long. But this was not the answer for her son, Carter. No way was a celebrity judge going to raise her child.

Instead, she shocked her Army specialist husband — and herself — by ditching her career in retail management and turning her home into a child care center for military families.

At bases around the country, military leaders are leaning on spouses like Bardsley to open their own family child care homes that will offload pressure from understaffed on-base centers with long waitlists.

Military moms are answering the call, lured by the triple promise of making good money, working from home, and being their own bosses.

But Bardsley and dozens of other moms have a warning for them. The rules and regulations, well-meaning though they are, are out of control.

You can’t store a box of fruit cups on the floor of your pantry: inspection violation.

Shovel snow immediately to ensure there’s always a clear path out of the house. But never leave children unattended to do so.

Take pictures of the children in your care only with a government-issued phone. Never mind that you won’t be issued a phone by the government.

Family child care centers can be a lifeline for military spouses who want careers and for parents of kids with special needs that make finding center-based care even more challenging.

But when The War Horse spoke with seven current and former providers who had taken care of military kids in 13 states, they said reams of rules and a culture of retaliation make them feel less like independent contractors and more like peons in a chain of command they did not sign up for.

Be your own boss, but act like an employee

Family child care providers care for up to six kids at a time who can’t access on-base child care spots, need care during nontraditional hours that centers can’t provide, or whose parents want a more home-like environment. In 2021, the latest year for which data is available, around 2,700 children were enrolled in a family child care home.

Air Force spouse Lisa Slaba said her children, now in first grade and pre-K, have “thrived exponentially” thanks to loving family child care providers who, as fellow military spouses, she’s more inclined to trust.

Home-based care for DOD families started decades ago as an informal way for military moms to help out other families while earning a living. But as the program grew, so did its playbook.

The DOD says its requirements for certifying family child care providers are “typically more stringent than state standards,” and providers are inspected more often; while most states require annual inspections, supervisors visit military child care homes every month.

And with supervisors able to interpret inspection criteria as they see fit, many providers say the level of oversight is more intrusive and less standardized than they expected.

“It’s no longer just people wanting to just drop their children off into a safe space,” said April Dingle, a provider at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

Today, parents expect a miniature child development center in these women’s living rooms.

The DOD seems to share that expectation.

On a recent inspection, Kayla Calhoun says she was told she had to leave all the lights on during naptime at the family child care center she runs from her home at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey; the Air Force regulation states that lights stay on in Child and Youth Program facilities. “This is my home, and you’re telling me I can’t turn my lights off?” Calhoun said.

Guidance like that makes some providers feel they’re responsible for running an on-base child care center with a staff of one.

Dingle says she has to be not only an early childhood educator but also a janitor, a medic should an emergency arise, a chef, and an administrator.

“I have to be just all these other different labels instead of just caring for kids,” she said. “That’s not what I thought I signed up for. I signed up to provide a safe space, a routine for these children, and care and love, but it’s way too much.”

Many of the rules providers must follow make perfect sense, and Dingle said everyone wants there to be reasonable boundaries.

But some of those rules? “Just crazy,” she said. Like having to use chemical test strips to confirm her home was properly cleaned and sanitized.

Or being told she can only serve the children food from the commissary, despite the fact that she was finding expired milk and spoiled meat on the shelves.

Kayla Calhoun used to take her toddler and a child she watched through the family child care program to a local farm nearly every Monday, when it was free for military families. The kids loved throwing pellets of food to the barnyard animals, climbing on the tire tower, and running through the splash pad.

Then the Air Force changed a regulation and said children under the age of two were not permitted on field trips. The preschooler Calhoun takes care of was allowed to visit the farm. But Calhoun’s own son Lyle — 18 months old at the time — was now considered too young for his own mother to drive him there.

“It’s asinine,” Calhoun said. Fun wasn’t the only casualty; a program coordinator misinterpreted the new regulation and told providers they could no longer take young children along to drop older ones off at school. “It really screwed over a lot of people,” said Calhoun.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Air Force, which oversees more family child care providers than any other service, said specific guidelines for providers ensure high-quality care for kids. And every licensed child care operation, military or civilian, must adhere to safety guidelines.

But the DOD’s expectations for military moms have gone too far for some.

Kayla Corbitt, the founder and CEO of Operation Child Care Project, a military child care advocacy nonprofit, surveyed 59 family child care providers in 2023. Just over a third of the 45 who had quit the business said they did so because of all the red tape and regulations.

Corbitt says from what she can tell, family child care providers have zero autonomy and are treated like employees, not independent contractors, as the military claims.

“I honestly always thought the IRS would eventually take them down,” she said. “You can’t claim someone is a [contractor] when you tell them when to work and what to charge and how to do your work and who you’re allowed to watch and where you’re allowed to watch them.”

A house that’s not a home

When Dingle became a family child care provider almost two decades ago, she was lured in part by the promise of working from home while she took care of her own kids.

But soon it didn’t feel like her home at all. With demands including materials to have and how to set up the space, it felt like an institutional care center.

When her children were around they were required to be in the same space as Dingle and the other kids — even if their father was home, even if they were old enough to go do their homework or hang out in their own rooms.

They couldn’t have friends over, or go put dishes in the sink.

“In that aspect, I’m not even my child’s parent at that time any longer,” she said. “It’s like I’m 100% provider.”

These rules are in place to protect kids and uphold fire, health, and safety standards, said the Air Force spokesperson. “We truly appreciate providers’ flexibility as adjustments are required to adhere to regulations,” they said.

While Dingle feels a sense of purpose taking care of children who really need her, she wants her home back.

“By this time next year,” she said, “I want to be completely done.”

Too many standards, not enough standardization

Despite all the family child care program’s regulations, many providers complained that their jobs and treatment look wildly different from installation to installation.

“Everything from paperwork to policies to the systems that are in place. … The way that things are implemented are different at every single garrison,” said Bardsley.

It all comes down to the relationships between providers and the various authorities overseeing the family child care program, providers said.

Providers say some coordinators and directors are helpful, knowledgeable, respectful, and encouraging. Get someone who is not well-trained, not that invested, or just plain vindictive? You could be in for it, providers told The War Horse.

Bardsley said she faced retaliation from a coordinator at one post after taking a policy issue she disagreed with to the garrison leadership. Before the month was out, Bardsley — who said she’d never once been written up for any violation in her nine years of providing military child care — received three write-ups, including serving lunch 15 minutes early and allowing children to remove their shoes indoors. She was threatened with closure. After her next move, to Texas, Bardsley decided running a family child care center was no longer for her.

Denise Clark, a three-time “FCC provider of the year” in two states, said she was excluded from the list of available home day cares at Scott Air Force Base, just east of St. Louis, after she refused to provide 50 hours of care each week and accept families using the military’s child care subsidy program.

Clark submitted a DOD complaint and met with Nathan Whitesides, the director of Scott Air Force Base’s Inspector General Complaints Resolution Department. Afterward, Whitesides searched for guidance stating providers had to offer 50 hours of care. He couldn’t find any.

“My belief is that there is no official written guidance and that the AF [Air Force] childcare program is running the FCC [family child care] program in an ad hoc manner without proper oversight,” Whitesides determined in a memo dated Dec. 4, 2023.

Without being able to get a straight answer from program leaders, he added that “The potential for fraud and/or abuse in this program is high.”

But instead of getting relief, Clark learned this summer her certification was being suspended after someone made a child maltreatment allegation. Investigators determined the allegation was unfounded, but revoked her certification anyway for a transgression Clark believes would have ended with a slap on the wrist for other providers. She thinks it is retaliation for challenging the 50-hour rule and lodging complaints.

Public affairs officials at Scott Air Force Base did not respond to a request for comment on Clark’s case.

Clark said she will continue fighting to clear her name. But she’s offended and confused by everything that’s happened. She and other disgruntled providers say it’s time to remind the Department of Defense that they’re not servicemembers duty-bound to say, “Yes, sir.” They’re moms — trying to do their part. “It really hurts,” she said.

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Jennifer Brookland is a regular contributor to The War Horse who served as a special agent in the Air Force before she received her master’s in journalism from Columbia University. She’s covered military and veterans’ issues for North Carolina Public Radio and child welfare for the Detroit Free Press. She was also a 2022 War Horse Fellow.

For students at places like Fort Campbell and Fort Knox high schools, it means touchdowns, soccer goals and volleyball digs are back, as their schools were untangled from shutdown politics.

“Allowing the sports to continue is just a small thing to some people, but to the students, coaches and parents, it’s huge,” Antonia Kruse, whose son, Levi, plays wide receiver and cornerback on the Fort Campbell High football team, said Tuesday. “They already have so many unknowns in their lives with being military dependents. They can have some sort of stability with their sports and activities.”

The schools have stayed open for normal instructional activities during the government shutdown. But the congressional stalemate left other school-related pursuits, even practices, in limbo. Fort Knox is in central Kentucky while Fort Campbell straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee border. The shutdown disrupted extracurriculars at other military post schools, including teams at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell welcomed the reprieve for military families.

“Our servicemembers and their children shouldn’t pay the price for Washington’s failure to fund the government,” McConnell said in a statement Tuesday evening. “I’m so grateful they’ll now be able to suit up and get back in the game.”

The Republican senator successfully intervened in the matter. He wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week, asking that athletics and extracurriculars at the schools be designated as activities allowed to proceed despite the shutdown. Within days, his request was granted.

The Department of Defense Education Activity, known as DoDEA, manages prekindergarten through 12th grade educational programs for the Department of Defense. DoDEA said in a statement that it received instructions from Hegseth that all student extracurriculars, including athletics and afterschool clubs, be considered “excepted activities during the current lapse in appropriations.”

At Fort Campbell High, that means the girls volleyball team’s banner season won’t be derailed. The team is on its way to the school’s first winning campaign in 15 years in the sport.

Without having practiced for a week, the team picked right back up by winning its first match Tuesday since resuming play, said parent Sarah Moore. The squad’s senior night game was called off last week due to the government shutdown.

“They have worked so hard to improve and be competitive this year, they couldn’t wait to get back on the court,” said Moore, whose daughter, Ava, plays on the team.

“We are thankful for the people who stood up for our kids and took action,” she added.

The disruption impacted much more than sports.

It applied to such activities as the Lejeune High School Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program, which has been recognized for its superior performance. The program’s cadets have participated in community service projects, leadership training exercises and competitive events, the school said.

The organization can currently host 1,300 families per day, and has served more than 500,000 families since its inception. This week, the organization marked a big milestone, as it dedicated the 100th Fisher House, located at the Capt. James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, Illinois.

But there will be no resting on laurels, says Fisher House Foundation Chairman Ken Fisher. In fact, the lessons learned from previous Fisher Houses and how they have been used have helped shape the future of the organization.

“It was our intention to build a Fisher House wherever one was needed,” says Fisher. “The need for Fisher House started to evolve in ways that we didn’t see before.”

That evolution has been driven by advancements in health care. As medics in the field and military doctors and nurses have learned how to treat injuries that would have previously been fatal, the number of troops killed in action has declined significantly. But survivors are often coming home with injuries such as multiple amputations that have created new challenges for both their ongoing health care and what Fisher House can provide.

But opportunities have been born from those challenges, as the organization has learned from Fisher House guests and how they have adapted in unexpected ways.

Fisher pointed out that in many cases, people will stay at one Fisher House initially, but then use other Fisher Houses as they transition from DOD health care to the VA. There was one other unexpected development as well.

“We also noticed that what was happening inside the houses was something that nobody ever thought was possible, and that was the support system that was forming in each and every house that we built,” says Fisher. “And why is that? Because when you look at it, you’re putting a group of people in one place under extreme stress. That can manifest itself in different ways. But as we learned and we noticed, the families had commonality of experience.

“Not many people understood what military and veteran families are going through, and so when you put these people together, what we found was they supported each other, and this was consistent in every Fisher House that we built.”

That support system is critical, because caring for wounded service members isn’t just about their physical needs. It also means taking mental burdens away, to help both those receiving treatment and their families focus on recovery.

“So there was the healing aspect, which made families better caregivers,” says Fisher. “It also made the patients better patients because they didn’t have to worry about not only the financial burden, but where their loved ones were staying and how they were getting from point A to point B.”

The mental and emotional support are critical to wounded service members, veterans and their families, but their physical needs must be met as well. The designing, planning and construction phases focus on accommodations such as wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, balconies that can be accessed by guests with limited mobility and elevators, as well as services such as on-site laundry and playrooms for children. As the needs of those who use Fisher House have changed, the organization has incorporated those needs into its planning and construction, providing for an easier user experience — which also helps with the mental and emotional aspects of a stay at a Fisher House by removing obstacles for those with limited mobility or other health issues.

“We didn’t want anyone not to be able to use a Fisher House because it wasn’t accessible given their current situation,” says Fisher. “I’d rather have a house that had too much than not enough.”

Learning from how Fisher Houses are being used has helped the organization adapt how it supports those in need, and not just through building physical locations. The organization created a Hero Miles program, where people can donate unused frequent flyer miles to help defray travel costs; to date, more than 70,000 airline tickets have been donated through the program. The organization also has a hotel program, where it can provide lodging in local hotels if there isn’t room at a Fisher House, through donations of credit card or hotel loyalty program points. In addition, Fisher House has multiple scholarship programs, which have awarded more than $27 million to 15,000 students, and is involved in sponsoring events such as the family programs for the Warrior Games and the Invictus Games.

“The Fisher House program has tried to keep up with the needs of our families,” Fisher says. “Servicemen, women and veterans, just by paying attention to what they’re doing and what their needs were, but also by staying lean and agile and only evolving in family-oriented ways.”

Lean and agile are key concerns for Fisher House, as its core mission is focusing on providing services to those who need them. Fisher points out that the organization spends 93 cents of every dollar it raises on providing services, and has received 20 consecutive four-star ratings from Charity Navigator for its performance and stewardship of how donations are spent.

“There’s a business mindset to running Fisher House, that we view ourselves as a public company and our donors are our shareholders,” says Fisher. “And so the dividends to our donors are the metrics, are the 600,000 families that have benefited from this program, the over $600 million in savings of lodging and travel, and plus the other things that we’ve gotten involved in.

“So what’s kept Fisher House on the straight and narrow is again having that public mindset, that mindset that we’re answering to our donors and to the people that we seek to serve. And if we’re not reaching those people, then we’re not doing our job, we’re not fulfilling our mission.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated.

The review, directed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this month, calls for officials to evaluate “current support for homeschooling military-connected families, as well as best practices, including the feasibility of providing facilities or access to other resources for those students.”

In his memo, Hegseth said the move is needed because “ensuring that military-connected families receive strong educational support maintains morale and readiness, reinforcing the overall stability and effectiveness of our military communities.”

Homeschooling is more common among military families than in the civilian population, in part because of the frequent moves and remote assignments of service members.

A Johns Hopkins University study released in March found that in 2024, about 12% of military families homeschooled their children, compared to about 6% for the nonmilitary American population. That gap remained consistent even during the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily shuttered schools nationwide.

The Defense Department operates 161 schools with roughly 67,000 students worldwide to help offset the challenges of providing education to military minors. The department does not require students to be enrolled in those schools, and does not have an official stance supporting or opposing homeschooling.

However, some states or foreign countries may have eligibility requirements for homeschooling. Defense Department officials in the past have said parents are responsible for ensuring compliance with those rules.

In an executive order from January, President Donald Trump ordered military leaders to submit a report on ways to expand schooling options for military children, “including private, faith-based, or public charter schools.” Hegseth said his homeschooling order is an extension of that effort.

The Department of Defense Education Activity does make some classes and resources available to homeschooled students, but the latest review aims to see if that assistance is enough.

Officials did not specify when the homeschooling review is expected to be completed.