As Veteran’s Day is celebrated nationwide, locally, officials at Johnson C. Smith University used the occasion to unveil new services the school is offering former military students.
Last week, JCSU officials approved a campus chapter of Student Veterans of America. Today, they officially opened the campus’s Veterans Support Hub, a space in the schools adult education program, where military veteran students can get together to interact and support each other. Cheryl Curtis, a JCSU adult program director, says veterans can come to the hub for help with employment, scholarship, legal, housing, academic and other issues.
“They can hold their meetings there, veterans can come and do their work there, they can counsel each other, they can hold small events there, so it’s a space just for them that nobody else on the campus uses,” Curtis said.
Curtis says the campus's Student Veterans of American leaders are helping them furnish and equip the space so it has what they need.
“My goal is to make sure we don’t just look good on paper. I wanted to make sure that anything the research says is a good practice to support the military student, I wanted to make sure that was here and one of those things best practices says, is we should have a dedicated space for our veteran and military students,” Curtis said.
According to Curtis, there were 21 military veteran students on campus that they know of last year. They are reaching out to students to determine if there are more who could benefit from the Veterans Support Hub.
