CONTINUING SERVICE — U.S. Army veteran and SWC student Megan Navarro still helps at the Chula Vista Veterans Home, which she considers her second family, even though she is no longer paid. Bruce Link, a U.S. Navy veteran, said he enjoys Navarro’s company.
Photo by Karen Tome
Chaos in Congress has hit home, specifically the Veteran’s Home in Chula Vista. Suspension of the Veterans Affairs Work-Study Program means the loss of funding to pay 80 student veterans who worked with the residents of the retirement home.
Many have stayed on as volunteers, but most left in search of a paying job. Students in the work-study are veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The program is designed to help transition returning soldiers back into school and civilian life by giving them a paying job working at the home.
VA Work-Study Program Supervisor Dorothy Diaz said 80 percent of her students are from Southwestern College.
Megan Navarro is one. After being honorably discharged from the U.S. Army in 2008, she enrolled at SWC with the hope of earning an associate’s degree in business management. Navarro found out about the work-study program from a fellow veteran and began working at the Chula Vista Facility. She mainly performs administration work, but like most workers there, Navarro helps where she is needed. Workers have a range of duties such as working at the front desk, the canteen store and in the dormitories, she said.
Kenneth “Ken” Munsun is a resident veteran and a part-time volunteer. He said the loss of the student workers has affected the entire facility. “There’s not a single department that doesn’t use the student workers.”
Title 38 of the United States Code, the federal guidelines governing veterans’ benefits, established the Work-Study Program. It expired June 30 and veteran work-study activity has been suspended. Navarro and a few others still work at the Veterans Home as volunteers, she said, but many others had to leave because of the financial strain.
Extensive background checks and vaccinations delay the hiring process, said Diaz.
“It has been a huge hardship not having this program on our side and for the veteran students,” she said.
Residents’ activities have been severely limited due to the lack of workers, said Navarro, and outings have been cancelled.
“Workers used to sit and read to the residents,” she said. “Now the residents mostly sit and watch TV to entertain themselves.”
Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders introduced legislation to extend work-study funding in August. Senator Barbara Boxer and Congressman Duncan Hunter (R – El Cajon) are co-sponsors. It is pending on Capitol Hill.
Diaz said she is optimistic that work-study allowances will be extended.
“It could be tomorrow, it could be the next day, it could be in a month, or in six months,” she said. “We have no idea.”
Diaz said it would be very simple for U.S. Congress to resolve the issue.
“This has happened twice before,” she said. “The important thing to mention is that there is no change in the verbiage. It’s boilerplate verbiage. All they need to do is remove the 2013 and put in 2016. That is what they did before.”