MU drops controversial veterans policy

An MU policy that gave student veterans less time to make up incomplete classes than civilians was pulled from the registrar’s Web site after it was brought to Chancellor Brady Deaton’s attention Friday.

MU spokesman Christian Basi said Tuesday the policy has never been enforced as written.

However, Carol Fleisher, MU’s veterans’ official, said she received notice of the new policy by e-mail in January, months after university lawyers began the process of redrafting it. The policy, which went into effect in January, said that students who are called to active duty would have six months to make up their unfinished classes after returning from their deployment.

Previously, they had a year to make up incomplete classes, the same amount of time given to civilian students.

“I had to read it three or four times because I was so certain no one could ever put in a policy like this,” Fleisher said. “Then I wrote back against it and was basically told, ‘Well, you’re not a lawyer.’”

Fleisher, who is responsible for helping students enter and leave the university’s system when they’re deployed, sent a lengthy e-mail to the MU registrar’s office Jan. 12 in which she argued that the policy was “unworkable and unfair as written.”

Fleisher then brought the change to the attention of student veterans, who have been working with her over the past couple of months to create a plan to turn the policy around.

The policy was rewritten to comply with a 1990 state statute that says universities and state institutions are required to give students who are called to active military service the option to either receive a refund of all tuition and fees for the semester in which they withdraw, or to take an incomplete on their courses and make up the work within six months of being discharged.

But the state law contains a clause that allows any public higher education institution or governing body to enact a more lenient academic policy. MU adopted the wording verbatim, although Basi said that was not intentional.

The change in policy was first brought to Deaton’s attention Friday at a ceremony honoring MU for its support of its veteran employees who are in the National Guard and Army Reserve, Basi said. Deaton was surprised by the wording of the new policy and asked Basi to look into the confusion. Now, university lawyers and officials in the registrar’s office are rewording the policy to clarify that student veterans will get “a minimum of six months” to make up their classes.

Basi said that even though the policy read as if student veterans only get six months to complete their classes, the university never changed its one-year policy.

“The wording is just incorrect,” he said. “We were just interpreting it differently than the way it was rewritten. Our policy was still to give them up to a year.”

Selman, who helped draft the new policy, said that the change came after an annual review of the registrar’s Web site, during which a staff member read over MU’s policy and felt that as written, it was out of compliance with the state legislation. As a result, the registrar’s office contacted the university’s legal counsel to rework the policy.

Selman said the change was not intended to make the requirements stricter for veterans than civilian students, and even though the new policy reads as if it is holding veterans to a stricter standard, she and her department didn’t interpret the wording that way until it was pointed out to them. Despite the fact that the wording has been that way for the past two months, Selman said the university would have never required a student to follow it.

“We will never hold a student to six months,” Selman said. “Nothing has changed in that manner. We will update everything as quickly as we can.”

Basi said that the policy will be rewritten in a way that will actually give veterans more time than civilian students, whose year to make up classes begins immediately after they take the incomplete. Basi said veterans will be given a year after they re-enroll with the university.

Fleisher said the biggest problem she and the veterans she spoke to had with the policy was that it was changed without consulting the people it affects the most: students.

“This seems to be a case where the people who wrote the policy and the law don’t have a comprehension of what it means to be a student veteran,” she said.

Other Missouri schools have not worded their policies to mention the six months laid out in the state law. Ozark Technical College, which has one of the highest enrollments of student veterans in Missouri, at more than 325, gives its students at least one year to make up incomplete classes. But even then, the college’s veterans’ official, Jeff Meyer, said the student can work with his or her professors if he or she needs more time.

Similar policies that allow veterans a year to make up classes are also followed at Missouri State University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, according to veterans’ officials at all four schools.

Basi said it’s MU’s goal to go out of its way to make sure veterans undergo a smooth transition in and out of its system.

But some veterans say the university has a lot of work to do if it wants to accomplish that goal.

“The university has been the only entity that has been a problem,” said MU senior and Marine Corps member Aaron Rinehart, who returned from a yearlong deployment in Africa in May. Nearly a year later, he is still trying to complete courses and clear up F’s that were accidentally issued to him. “Everything else — sorting out my loans, getting a job, finding an apartment — has worked out smoothly.”