News and Knowledge

If you are a military family, we don’t need to tell you that military families that have children with disabilities are considered underserved. In fact, says Vicki Farnsworth, assistant director at The Branch, that’s why her organization was established in January 2015. The Branch Military Parent Technical Assistance Center builds the capacity of federal parent centers to help military families that have children (including youth) with disabilities.

What, you may ask, are parent centers? Every state has at least one parent center that provides families with information about disabilities, available services, interventions and therapies, local policies, and more. The Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education funds the 90 plus centers and technical assistance centers like The Branch.

As a technical assistance center, the Branch’s role is to offer education and information to those parent centers so that they can provide assistance to the military families in their areas, something that is sorely needed. “Military families move frequently and often have to find and start services for their children over and over again. As a military spouse and parent of a son with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I know how difficult that can be,” Farnsworth notes.

Making Sure Military Families Have What They Need

The Branch has three goals:

• Provide parent centers with high-quality, relevant, useful, and accurate information on topics that increase their effectiveness when working with military families.
• Build the capacity of the parent centers in the 10 states with the highest number of military personnel to establish effective relationships with military families, which includes setting up opportunities for parent center staff to meet those military families and to introduce them to school liaison officers.
• Offer technical assistance and consulting to parent centers that request help with a specific issue or problem

The end goal is to ensure that military families always have someone to contact for help with issues like finding speech therapy in the area they just moved to or getting information on what assistance they can expect at their child’s new school. Farnsworth says that one of The Branch’s key accomplishments is connecting military families to organizations like OAR that

can offer resources through the parent centers. The work that The Branch does is often invisible to the families it helps most, but it is seen and recognized, resulting in some cases in even more assistance for military families. Farnsworth noted that because of The Branch’s efforts in one of the states with a high number of military families, the state’s department of education provided funding for a full-time staff member to work directly with the military population in that state.