Education from The Center for Public Integrity

Students from two colleges file federal complaints related to sexual assault

2013-04-19T11:02:47-04:00

Current and former students at two more prestigious colleges have reportedly filed federal complaints alleging mistreatment of campus sexual assault victims — the subject of a major investigation by the Center for Public Integrity.

The New York Times reported that the complaints were filed against Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Occidental College in California, alleging violations of the Title IX civil rights law, and in Occidental’s case, the Cleary Act, which established strict rules on reporting of campus crime. Over the past couple years, other elite schools, such as Wesleyan, Yale, Amherst and the University of North Carolina, have been plagued by similar allegations.

In 2009 and 2010, the Center – in collaboration with NPR – did a series of investigative pieces entitled “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice.” The series revealed that students found “responsible” for campus sexual assaults often face little or no punishment from school judicial systems, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down.

Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act headed for President's signature

2013-03-02T13:50:16-05:00

The House of Representatives passed federal legislation aimed at combating campus sexual violence on Thursday, including it in a bipartisan renewal of the Violence Against Women Act following months of congressional gridlock. The Senate has already approved the measure, which means passage is virtually assured; President Barack Obama could sign it into law as early as next week.

In a vote of 286 to 138, House members approved a reauthorization of VAWA that incorporates, as Section 304, the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, known as Campus SaVE. The final tally came after lawmakers had defeated a Republican-backed amendment that would have omitted the act’s language from VAWA altogether.

Campus SaVE is meant to address problems highlighted in an investigation of campus sexual assault by the Center for Public Integrity. Published in a six-part series starting in 2009, “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice” — done in collaboration with National Public Radio — showed that campus judicial proceedings regarding allegations of sexual assault were often confusing, shrouded in secrecy, and marked by lengthy delays. Those who reported sexual assaults encountered a litany of institutional barriers that either assured their silence or left them feeling victimized again. Even students found “responsible” for alleged sexual assaults often faced little punishment, while their victims’ lives frequently turned upside down.

“The victims’ rights components [of Campus SaVE] were designed around the gaps identified by the Center for Public Integrity’s report,” said Daniel Carter, a long-time victims’ advocate now with the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, who helped draft the original bill. “This would not have been possible without that series.”

The legislation, first filed in the fall of 2010, will expand required campus education programs to include prevention awareness and bystander intervention strategies for students, meant to stop sexual assaults from occurring. The measure aims to improve victim protections by guaranteeing counseling, legal assistance, and medical care on campus, among other accommodations. It also will establish minimum, national standards for all schools to follow in responding to allegations of sexual assault and sexual violence. For instance, the act makes explicit that schools must afford both the alleged perpetrator and the alleged victim the same rights — access to advisers, written notifications, as well as appeals processes — during campus disciplinary proceedings.

The VAWA reauthorization passed the Senate on February 12, in a 78 to 22 vote. Following the House action, President Obama said in a statement that the VAWA represents “an important step towards making sure no one in America is forced to live in fear.” The president said he “look[s] forward to signing it into law as soon as it hits my desk.”

Campus SaVE will technically take effect one year after the president signs the VAWA reauthorization, but as a practical matter, its effects will first be felt at the start of the 2014-15 school year, when colleges and universities have to release their annual campus-crime reports.

Victim advocates, who have pressed for Campus SaVE’s passage for months, say they are stunned — and delighted — by the sudden passage of the Violence Against Women Act, following weeks of legislative stalemate. Many of them were walking the halls of Capitol Hill earlier this week, talking with anybody who would listen about the bill’s virtues. On Tuesday, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York, re-introduced Campus SaVE on the House side. That same day, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi held a press conference about the Senate version of the VAWA reauthorization, urging House members pass that legislation in its existing form —and that’s what happened.

Laura Dunn, whose case was featured in the Center series, spoke at the Pelosi event about her experiences in 2005, detailing how her allegations of rape by a crew member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison took the university nine months to investigate, before deciding against filing disciplinary charges against her alleged attacker. “I requested House members please pass VAWA,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it to happen in a couple days.”

Dunn and other advocates say Campus SaVE will improve the lives of student victims, providing a smoother process for them to report allegations and to appeal. They applaud its requirements for schools to publicly disclose incidents of sexual assault on campus, as well as to publish policies on sexual assault. The legislation will also codify some crucial components of the Education Department’s first-ever federal guidance on how schools must respond to student complaints of campus rape, issued in April 2011.

“This gives me a lot of hope things will change,” Dunn adds.

Lawmakers also hailed its passage. In a brief statement, Maloney, the bill’s House sponsor, said, the legislation “will help students, administrators and the public.” She noted that college administrators will now benefit from guidance on best practices from the departments of Justice and Education, while the public will benefit from the disclosure of incidents of sexual assault, stalking, and dating violence on college campuses.

Her Senate counterpart, Pennsylvania Democrat Robert Casey, Jr., said Campus SaVE will help “ensure that college campuses are safe and secure places to learn and work.”

The measure’s passage comes just one month after news that current and former students at the University of North Carolina have urged the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate the university. The group, including Melinda Manning — the school’s former assistant dean of students and an alum — filed a complaint with the civil-rights office in January, alleging the university has violated the rights of assault victims and created a “hostile environment” for them on campus. The complaint also accuses officials of pressuring Manning to under-report sexual assault cases. One of the students, Landen Gambill, whose allegations of rape by another student were dismissed by a student-run judicial board last year, now faces disciplinary charges herself for speaking out about her case.

The UNC case has quickly made headlines, prompting the school to create a website, “Campus Conversation on Sexual Assault,” where it has posted its policies on the topic. In response to the 2011 federal guidance, the university has rewritten its procedures for campus rape probes since Gambill’s case last year. Today, it no longer allows its student-run disciplinary board to decide such allegations.

In a statement, the university denied the current disciplinary charges against Gambill represent any retaliation for filing the civil-rights complaint. The school, it said, has never tried to discipline a student for reporting sexual violence.

“This University works hard to encourage students to come forward and report instances of sexual violence,” the school said. “We are committed to eliminating sexual assault and violence from our community.”

“We need to recognize there is quite a large battle ahead,” said Dunn, referring to the UNC case. “But this is a great first step, and we should take a moment to celebrate it.”

Te'o saga brings renewed criticism of Notre Dame

2013-01-23T17:17:11-05:00

The 'Alice in Wonderland' saga of Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o and the girlfriend who turned out to be a hoax has ignited a new round of criticism over the school's handling of a sexual assault allegation against a different football player more than two years ago.

Notre Dame hired a private investigative firm in an attempt to unravel fact from fiction in regard to Te'o and the fictitious girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, who was said to have died last fall. Notre Dame athletic directior Jack Swarbrick later held an emotional press conference to defend Te'o and cast him as the victim of a cruel ruse.

That was quite a contrast, critics charge, to the treatment afforded freshman Lizzy Seeberg, who reported to campus police in August 2010 that she'd been sexually assaulted by a football player. Police waited two weeks before interviewing the player. By then, Seeberg had committed suicide. Notre Dame said a "thorough and judicious" investigation was conducted. The player was later found "not responsible" in a closed-door campus judiciary hearing.

As our Kristen Lombardi reported last month, the circumstances surrounding the Seeberg case are actually far from unusual. Colleges have long struggled mightily in their attempts to deal with charges of campus sexual assault.

Read Lombardi's story here.

Notre Dame case highlights complexities of campus sexual assault investigations

2013-01-23T17:09:58-05:00

Notre Dame’s high-profile re-emergence among college football’s elite has focused new attention on the university’s long-standing claims that it does things “the right way” — that football players are treated like anyone else on campus, with no special favors.

The boasts of lofty moral standards have long struck other schools’ fans as a bit sanctimonious. But they are getting fresh scrutiny now, in part because the bright lights of college football’s biggest stage have brought renewed attention to a two-year-old case involving a Notre Dame player and chilling allegations of sexual assault.

In August 2010, 19-year-old freshman Lizzy Seeberg accused the athlete of sexually assaulting her in his dorm. She filed a report with campus police, which sat on it for two weeks before even interviewing him. By then, Seeberg had committed suicide. Administrators would later convene a closed-door campus disciplinary hearing—three months after Seeberg’s death became national news—in which the player was found “not responsible.” In the university's only direct comment on the case, Notre Dame's president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, told the South Bend Tribune in December 2010 that university police had conducted a "thorough and judicious investigation that followed the facts..." He acknowledged, however, that the inquiry could have been conducted "more quickly, perhaps." The player, who has not been publicly identified, reportedly has never missed a game, nor presumably will he miss tonight’s national championship contest with Alabama’s Crimson Tide. Meanwhile, a small but vocal number of critics are asking pointed questions about how this case was handled, and wondering aloud whether Notre Dame’s righteous rhetoric is really a fiction.

As tragic as the details of the Seeberg case are, they are actually far from unusual. The struggles that colleges have faced in addressing campus sexual assault were the subject of an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity beginning in 2009. Published in a six-part series, “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Frustrating Search for Justice,” the investigation showed that campus judicial proceedings were often confusing, shrouded in secrecy and marked by lengthy delays, leaving alleged victims feeling like they were victimized a second time. Those who reported sexual assault encountered a litany of institutional barriers that often led to dropped complaints. Even students found “responsible” for alleged sexual assaults often faced little punishment, while their victims’ lives frequently turned upside down. Many times, victims dropped out of school — or worse — while their alleged attackers graduated.

The Center series — done in collaboration with National Public Radio — shed light on what Education Department officials have since called “an epidemic of sexual violence” on campuses. According to a report funded by the Justice Department, roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. Much of the problem is up to the institutions to address, because prosecutors face imposing obstacles in filing criminal charges; allegations come down to he-said-she said accounts that may be colored by alcohol, while physical evidence and eyewitness testimony are often lacking.

In April 2011, the Education Department’s civil rights office unveiled its most thorough guidance on how schools must respond to student complaints of campus rape. The 19-page “dear colleague letter,” combined with a unique enforcement strategy, has spurred change at dozens of schools nationwide, including Notre Dame. There’s also proposed federal legislation aimed at combating campus sexual violence.

The guidance hasn’t pleased everyone, and the legislation is, for the moment, stalled. Sadly, cases like Seeberg’s continue to make headlines. The latest comes from elite Amherst College, where a former student has documented allegations of her school’s callous treatment following an alleged rape by a classmate. Highly emotional, colored by broader cultural stereotypes, these cases remain among the thorniest for colleges and universities. Even so, lawyer Brett Sokolow, who advises college administrators, says he believes they have improved their handling of what he calls “the garden variety cases” — those without ties to money or influence.

But “the old rules still apply if [the alleged assailant is] a star athlete or a student president…Corruption still exists in those cases,” he says, while adding he’s not familiar with the details of the Seeburg case.

Changes

That new federal guidance, announced with fanfare by Vice President Joe Biden, says schools have an obligation, under the federal law known as Title IX, to investigate student complaints, and to take prompt and effective action to end harm.

The guidance has drawn fierce pushback, much of it focused on a policy the civil rights office was already enforcing: that schools should rely on the more lenient evidence standard in these cases — “preponderance of evidence” rather than the higher “clear and convincing” or even “beyond a reasonable doubt” evidence standards. Groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which advocates for free speech and due process, have penned multiple letters arguing that such a “weak” principle undermines, in its words, “the reliability, integrity and basic fairness of the disciplinary process.”

“We see the burden of proof on many campuses being the only protection an accused student has,” says FIRE’s Joe Cohn, whose last letter, in May 2012, included 19 professors, lawyers and other individuals as co-signers.

Taking a cue from the department, many colleges and universities were using the preponderance standard when the guidelines came out. Others have followed suit. Some 40 schools at last count have also adopted what administrators describe as “the easy things” — policy reforms and procedural fixes like hiring a Title IX coordinator and offering appeal rights to both the accused and accusing students. Some administrators are even clamoring for more guidance to clear up lingering “confusion” about what Title IX requires.

By all accounts, the civil rights office has become far more aggressive since December 2010, when it announced its first in a series of “model” settlements with schools regarding policies on campus sexual assault. These settlements have emerged from “compliance reviews” that were pushed by the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, who stepped down in early December. Unlike formal complaints, which students must file before the office can act, these compliance reviews have allowed the department to act proactively in response to allegations of campus sexual violence.

To date, there have been 11 such reviews — and the first one was at Notre Dame. Prompted by the Seeberg case, the civil rights office launched a seven-month investigation into how the school handles all sexual assault complaints. That ended in June 2011 with a “voluntary resolution agreement,” in which Notre Dame agreed to speed up investigations, adopt the “preponderance” standard, and issue no-contact orders for alleged assailants and their alleged victims, among other things. Seth Galanter, the civil rights office’s acting director, declined to discuss the Notre Dame resolution, citing its “open” status. The office is currently monitoring the school to ensure its compliance.

Many of the reviews are ongoing, but the office has hammered out similar settlement agreements with such schools as Eastern Michigan and Yale. Last spring, it took the rare step of joining the Justice Department in examining how the University of Montana, as well as local law enforcement, handle campus rape allegations — after several prominent cases there, some involving football players. The civil rights office has even seen the number of formal complaints from students filed against schools soar to more than 120 in the past four years— a rise of more than 41 percent.

“One of our goals,” Galanter says, “is to make sure the April 2011 ‘dear colleague’ letter isn’t just a piece of paper.”

A multi-front struggle

Over on Capitol Hill, victim advocates have pressed for passage of the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act. Filed in the fall of 2010, the federal legislation was meant to codify the Title IX guidance, creating minimum, national standards for colleges and universities. Two years later, after lobbying by FIRE and others brought about changes in the bill, some supporters now actually oppose it. The most notable change: the bill would no longer require schools to use the “preponderance” standard.

“Now we have this monstrous bill all wrapped up in nice sounding language,” says lawyer Wendy Murphy, a prominent victim advocate. She believes the bill, stripped of that mandate, would give institutions leeway to use a higher burden, thus in her view undermining the guidance.

Bill supporters counter that the SaVE Act would still require that institutions expand programs to offer prevention awareness and bystander intervention education, meant to stop sexual assaults from occurring. And the legislation would improve victim protection, they say, by guaranteeing counseling, legal assistance, and medical care on campus, as well as other accommodations.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” agrees Daniel Carter, a long-time victim advocate now with the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, who helped draft the original bill. But “no one was willing to sacrifice [the whole measure]” he explains, to preserve a few of its mandates.

Administrators and advocates alike expect the legislation to pass — eventually. It had been incorporated, as Section 304, into the Senate’s re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, but not the House’s. Advocates were pinning their hopes on the bill making it in the final version of VAWA until the House let it expire at the end of the congressional session on January 3. Now, it will have to be re-introduced, as will the stand-alone version of the bill. Its sponsor, Senator Robert Casey Jr., a Democrat from Pennsylvania, will keep working to ensure final passage of the Campus SaVE Act in the 113^th Congress, his office says.

For all the attention on campus sexual assault, it remains an intractable and complex problem. The cultural climate surrounding these cases is tense— especially those involving athletes. They are, after all, popular public figures who may be pivotal to the reputation and success of a school’s highest-profile programs.

It all feels painfully familiar to Laura Dunn, whose case was featured in the Center series; in 2005, she reported her allegations of rape by a crew member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He denied the allegations. It took the university nine months to contemplate, and then reject, filing disciplinary charges against him.

“It’s almost like you’re attacking something bigger than the individuals who assaulted you,” Dunn says. When she thinks about how much progress colleges have made in combating campus sexual assault, her thoughts turn to Lizzy Seeberg and that Notre Dame football player.

“Until college athletes are handled differently,” Dunn says, “nothing has changed.”

Justice Department launches probe into sexual assault at the University of Montana

2012-05-22T13:43:28-04:00

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday announced it had opened multiple investigations into how local authorities and school officials handled a series of recent sexual assault allegations at the University of Montana. The adjudication of sexual assault cases on college campuses was the subject of a series of stories by the Center for Public Integrity.

Questions involving the handling of sexual assault cases have engulfed the university and its hometown of Missoula since late last year, when the school announced it had hired an outside investigator to look into allegations that two university students were drugged and gang-raped in December. That probe eventually grew to include other cases; the Justice Department said that at least 11 reported sexual assaults involving UM students had occurred in an 18-month period. The university faced criticism for how it handled the cases, as did the Missoula Police department and the county attorney. Several of the cases involve allegations against players for the school’s popular and successful football team, the Grizzlies. The university fired the school’s athletic director and head football coach in late March.

The Justice department said it had opened a Title IX compliance review and Title IV probe regarding the school’s response to sexual assaults. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 both bar sex discrimination, including sexual assault and sexual harassment, in educational programs. The department also announced it had begun a so-called civil pattern or practice investigation focusing on allegations that University of Montana Office of Public Safety, the Missoula Police Department and the Missoula County Attorney’s Office may have failed to adequately investigate and prosecute alleged sexual assaults against women in Missoula. The department will also coordinate with the Department of Education on a related sexual harassment complaint against members of the UM football team.

Attorney general Eric Holder called the allegations “very disturbing.” He said the department’s pattern or practice authority “enables us to ensure that law enforcement agencies are doing what is necessary to combat this despicable crime without discrimination, and we take that responsibility seriously.” City, police and university officials pledged their full cooperation.

Starting in late 2009, the Center for Public Integrity published a series of pieces looking at how sexual assault cases are handled on college campuses. The Center reported that students who have been the victim of sexual assaults face a depressing array of barriers that often either assure their silence or leave them feeling victimized a second time. The Center also found that students found “responsible” for sexual assaults in campus judicial proceedings often face little or no punishment from school judicial systems, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down.

Undaunted, Senator still trying to close decrepit schools on military bases

2011-12-09T05:06:01-05:00

The Senate has decided not to take up a proposal that would close rather than repair decrepit Defense Department-run schools on military bases, creating a flood of thousands of students to nearby public school systems.

But the plan’s chief architect, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), is vowing to try again. He estimates potential savings to the Pentagon from closing “unnecessary” schools at more than $1 billion over four years.

Coburn spokeswoman Becky Bernhardt said the senator was “disappointed and frustrated that the Senate, yet again, chose to ignore the chance to achieve real savings in refusing to vote on a common-sense amendment.”

The Defense Department runs about 60 schools on military bases in the U.S., many of which are run-down, too small, and pose health and safety risks to children, as the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News reported in a series, “The Military Children Left Behind.”

Three out of four Pentagon-run schools are beyond repair or require major renovation, the news organization found.

Coburn proposed that instead of spending more than $1 billion on planned renovations – plus an annual $14,000-$16,000 for each student – the Defense Department could transfer $12,000 per student per year to local schools enrolling the students.

“It is no longer clear why the system is still necessary, or why the Defense Department plans to spend $1.2 billion [over the next four years] to rebuild these schools,” said Corburn in a statement on his website.

Many of the schools, Coburn noted, are holdovers from just after World War II, when military parents wanted to send their children to integrated schools; many public schools remained segregated. The only way for military parents to send their children to integrated schools was to build them on base.

The Senate approved a $662 billion defense bill on Dec. 1 without Coburn’s amendment.

A 2010 Fiscal Commission report first suggested closing these schools. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) both supported the plan.

Cash-strapped school districts, meanwhile, are worried about the impact of closing schools on bases. More than 19,000 students would have to be accommodated by public school districts near bases where military schools have been shuttered.

The $12,000 per student per year subsidy to the schools that accept the students might not be enough to cover costs, public school systems say. “It’s an issue that needs to be assessed at the local level whether that particular school district…has the facility capacity, personnel,” said Jocelyn Bissonnette at the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools. “Many school districts are facing fewer dollars. There is a concern about the cost that would be associated with this.”

The 2012 defense construction budget, which has not yet been approved by Congress, would allocate $550 million to repair or replace 15 Defense Department-run schools, six of which are on bases in the U.S. That’s up more than $100 million from the 2011 defense construction budget, which allocated $439 million to repair or replace 10 Defense Department-run schools, six of which are on bases in the U.S.

Nonetheless, as iWatch News has reported, the funding falls well short of the estimated $4 billion needed to repair or replace all the Defense Department-run schools that need work.

Congress also appropriated $250 million earlier this year for upgrades to 12 of the 160 civilian-run schools on military bases. That is an estimated $1 billion short of what is needed to fix all 62 of the 160 public-run schools on bases that are in “poor” or “failing” condition, reported iWatch News.

Geronimo Road Elementary School, in Coburn’s home state of Oklahoma, is one of the failing, public-school-run military base schools. As iWatch News reported, the Fort Sill-based school has termite-infested walls, air conditioning so archaic it drowns out the teachers’ voices, and buckets dotting the chipped floors to catch the rain as soaks through rotting ceiling tiles.

Tens of thousands of students attend schools – some run by the Pentagon, others by public school districts – that are the military itself considers to be failing. In the last ten years, conditions at the schools have worsened, even as parents faced longer deployments.

Despite the military’s promise to provide high-quality education to children of active-duty soldiers, many of these schools even fail to meet Defense Department standards.

The Defense Department declined to comment on the Coburn amendment.

Pentagon lacks funding to fix public schools on military bases

2011-09-21T06:00:01-04:00

A top Pentagon official has acknowledged that the Defense Department is more than $1 billion short of what’s needed to repair decrepit public schools on military bases that were the subject of a recent iWatch News investigation.

The official, Jo Ann Rooney, principal deputy under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in an interview with iWatch News that the Pentagon will be able to start renovating or replacing only about a dozen of the public schools on bases with the $250 million that Congress appropriated this year for the upgrades. A recent Pentagon report, however, found that about 62 of the 160 civilian-run schools are in “poor” or “failing” condition.

“There is a lot of work that needs to be done. Two hundred and fifty million dollars will not cover it,” Rooney said. “Depending on whether there is additional money coming forward, I can’t predict when those next group of schools would actually be addressed.”

An investigation by iWatchNews in June found that many of the schools attended by children of military personnel are in poor shape. Where military children go to school depends on circumstances often beyond families’ control. More than 500,000 children, the largest proportion, live off base, attending local schools in urban or suburban communities that often have significantly more resources.

But families who live on military installations — either for economic, career or security reasons — send their children to one of 194 base schools operated by the Pentagon around the world, or 160 base schools in the U.S. operated by local school districts.

Rooney’s sober assessment deals with those base schools operated by local districts, which are attended by about 150,000 students . Funding fixes for these schools is especially complex. For one thing, the Pentagon can't use its own funds for civilian schools on military bases and must obtain a special congressional appropriation. These schools are also required to cover 20 percent of the repair bill themselves. But school districts also frequently have trouble raising money for construction work on base schools through new local taxes or bonds because military families often don’t vote or pay taxes in their communities. If districts cannot meet the 20 percent requirement, the Pentagon will sometimes step in to help. If that happens, though, fewer schools on the list will get funding for repairs this year.

The districts with schools that have the greatest needs will be meeting with Pentagon officials from the Office of Economic Adjustment, which is overseeing the process, next month. Three school districts face an additional challenge of having two schools in the top 12 in need of repair: those at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California; Fort Sill in Oklahoma; and Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.

Some of those schools will most likely have to wait — and hope —for an additional congressional appropriation.

“The big issue on future congressional appropriations is the larger deficit discussion,” said Joyce Raezer, executive director of the National Military Families Association. “If everything is on the table and there are many folks on the Hill who do not believe school construction is a federal responsibility, then getting more could be problematic.”

John Forkenbrock of the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools said there has been discussion on the House side of adding another $250 million for school construction to this year’s appropriation but no one knows whether the funding will ultimately go through.

“There is support there but it’s just a matter of whether the budget will allow,” Forkenbrock said. “Right now it’s still kind of a question mark.”

The 194 schools that are actually run by the Pentagon have their own problems. The iWatchNews investigation found that three in four Pentagon-run schools are either beyond repair or would require extensive renovation to meet minimum standards. But the Pentagon has already made plans to renovate or replace 134 of those schools with the worst problems over the next five years.

So far 28 projects at those schools are underway and Rooney said the Pentagon will be able to find the money to cover them all.

But however long it takes, Rooney said that getting funding for all schools on military bases “is not something that’s going to be dropped.

“We want to make sure that the children of our military families are taken care of and given the best opportunities for education,” she said.