Maurice Matthews is a journalism student at West Virginia University.
He hopes to combine his reporting skills with his love of sports to become a sports broadcaster.
But working toward that goal hasn’t been easy.
His schooling was interrupted when he joined the military.
“I was in the Marines, down at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Second Battalion Sixth Marines,” he said.
Matthews served two tours in Iraq. He returned to school at the age of 23.
He’s one of nearly 5,000 student veterans attending West Virginia’s private and public colleges and universities.
The West Virginia legislature is debating bills in the House and Senate this session that would provide more services to student vets.
Richard Iaquinta, D-Harrison, introduced House Bill 4145.
“We just wanted to make sure that the veterans and the alumni and the people on campus realize that these students are very, very special,” he said.
“Not only are they serving the state in emergency situations, they are going overseas, taking care of their families, and faculty members might not know some of the problems that being in the military today might entail.”
The bill outlines several steps schools should take to make campuses more “veteran-friendly.”
These include appointing and training faculty to act as liaisons for student veterans, establishing student veteran organizations on campus, and creating programs to help student veterans meet prospective employers.
Skip Gebhart is the administrator of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission’s Office of Veteran’s Education Programs.
“Many of the provisions that are in the bill are things we are already doing on campuses to one degree or another,” he said.
“I think this is not so much a bill that is creating something new as much as it is highlighting things that are going on and trying to bring some consistency statewide to how we deal with veterans.”
Gebhart says one inconsistency around the state is how veterans can obtain academic credit toward their degrees based on their military training.
He says this bill will help resolve this issue.
“There is a national guide that can be used, but each institution can apply it the way they want to,” he said.
“Through this bill, and through the work we will be doing, we try to bring some consistency to how and when institutions do apply that credit, so that veterans know, when selecting a school, how much credit they will get for their military experience.”
The bill also addresses establishing relationships with student veterans and community organizations and providing more disability services for student veterans on campus.
Maurice Matthews is two years shy of his degree.
He thinks more consideration for veterans will help students like him.
“Some of the admin guys have special classes they go to. I am pretty sure some of the classes they took could have counted as a couple English credits,” Matthews said.
“I probably could have taken a test to test out of one of the Arabic classes and have it count toward my foreign language credit, but I didn’t have the opportunity to.”
The bill adopts recommendations of the Veterans Initiative Task Force from December, which was appointed by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission.