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Mission: Family: S2S helps students adjust overseas

As a junior in high school, David Vinson didn’t like it at all when the Army transferred his father and his family moved to South Korea in 1979.

“I went from a school in Newport News, Va., where the graduating class was 351, to Seoul American High School, where the graduating class was 63,” he said.

But at a recent reunion of school alumni, Vinson said that in hindsight, “It was one of the best experiences of my life.”

With North Korea and South Korea still technically at war, and with the possibility that hostilities could break out at any time, parents prepared their children by ensuring they had a bag packed at all times and extra money on hand.

But the former residents fondly remember shopping in the Itaewon district, meeting Korean people, eating Korean food, the excellent education in the Defense Department school and the closeness of the students.

Unlike most high school reunions, not all the students who attended graduated from the high school. Judy Archambault lived in South Korea from 1979 to 1981, when she was in seventh and eighth grade. She advises military children going to South Korea today to seize the moment.

Students in South Korea are learning to do that earlier these days. Jimmy Grandinette, a rising senior at Seoul American High School, has been in South Korea since the eighth grade, when the Army transferred his dad to Army Garrison Yongsan.

He advises new students to “get familiar with the base, since Yongsan is big. And definitely get off the base and do things, especially in Seoul.”

Thanks to a Military Child Education Coalition program called Student 2 Student, or S2S, new students at Seoul can get acclimated to their school and the area more quickly, and meet other students through student mentors such as Grandinette, who runs the program.

S2S is active in a number of U.S. public schools as well as in many Defense Department schools around the world.

When Air Force daughter Megan Stankewicz was new to Osan American High School in South Korea, she jumped right into S2S to help other new students. “It was a great way to meet new people,” said Megan, who is 15 and a rising sophomore.

Her advice to new students sounds very much like that of her predecessors: “Don’t listen to what other people say. Korea is fun. A lot of students complain about being bored, but they need to get off base” and experience Korean culture, she said.

“It’s so much fun,” she said. “We’re lucky we get to live there.”

Being a teen is hard enough without uprooting every few years. But military kids are helping other military kids “enjoy the moment” by making friends and having fun — whether in Seoul, San Diego or dozens of other places around the world.