Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Army Human Resources Command (HRC) was located at the Soldier Support Center off Normandy Drive. While Fort Bragg’s EFMP works with HRC to ensure soldiers’ permanent change of station orders are in locations with the services needed to care for their family member with special needs, HRC is located at Fort Knox in Kentucky. This article has been updated with the correct information. CityView apologizes for this error.
After 18 months of planning and building renovations, Fort Bragg’s Exceptional Family Member Program staff have a new office to help soldiers and their family members with special needs thrive.
Located on the fourth floor of the Soldier Support Center off Normandy Drive, the EFMP office brings the program’s pillars — “Medical” and “Family Support” — under one roof. Instead of bouncing between the Joel Clinic on Logistics Avenue and the Soldier Support Center for services, soldiers and their families can now find everything from case management to health care coordination at the new centralized office.
“We want to ensure that the soldiers feel supported when they come to Fort Bragg,” Casey Clark, Fort Bragg’s EFMP manager and a retired Army staff sergeant, told CityView. “We want to streamline any processes that have been frustrating in the past, and work together the best we can to support soldiers from behind the scenes.”
Fort Bragg’s EFMP program is the first to co-locate services in the Army. It’s also the largest in the Army, serving almost 6,000 individual family members with medical- or education-related special needs. And the EFMP is only expected to grow, Clark said, since many soldiers with family members with special needs are sent to Fort Bragg because of its proximity to the Duke and UNC health systems.
“This is a big deal for soldiers, their families and their children,” Fort Bragg Garrison Commander Col. Chad Mixon said in an article from the Fort Bragg Garrison Public Affairs Office. “It’s a step forward in ensuring they receive the support they need.”
A one-stop shop
EFMP has three pillars: EFMP Medical, EFMP Family Support and EFMP Human Resources Command (HRC). EFMP Medical enrolls and renews families into the program. It also coordinates health care in the community and conducts travel screenings.
HRC helps families with permanent changes of station, ensuring their next installation is somewhere where they can access the health care they need. Family Support provides case management, offering connections to community resources and support groups, adaptive family events, and respite care.
As Major Michael Swientek discovered with his 5-year-old daughter Ryleigh, navigating EFMP is often confusing.
Ryleigh was born with clubfoot, and she developed juvenile idiopathic arthritis — the most common type of arthritis in children under 16 — while Swientek was stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. Swientek spent a lot of time on the phone navigating the installation’s EFMP and bouncing between its Medical staff and Family Support staff.
“You’d find a phone number for EFMP, and you call and they would be like, ‘Sorry, you’re not calling the right place, call this number,’” Swientek recalled. “And you’d call that number, and they’re like, ‘Oh, you actually need the other side of this building. Call over there.’”
Swientek’s experience is common. Before the launch of the centralized office in April, Clark said Fort Bragg’s soldiers and their families didn’t know who to contact from EFMP for their family member’s needs. He said soldiers would often call his Family Support team, who would need to forward them to the Joel Clinic without knowing whether EFMP Medical was available.
The centralized office aims to eliminate this problem.
“We’re integrating a little bit more. We [at EFMP Family Support] will not do what Medical does. Medical will not do what we do. Those are totally separate entities. But, we can absolutely conduct warm handoffs,” Clark said. “We can talk to you about what EFMP Family Support does. If you are in EFMP Medical, and you didn’t know anything about EFMP Family Support, then they can walk you over here.”
Swientek said the centralized EFMP is much simpler than the EFMP he experienced at Fort Riley, where he said the program was disparate and spread across the installation.
“When you bring it into a cohesive organization that is co-located together, it’s a lot easier for me just to call, and for them to be like, ‘You know what? I just talked to him 10 minutes ago. Let me go down and talk to him real quick,’” Swientek said. “It’s the responsiveness that’s huge. I don’t have to wait two, three or four weeks; I can just pick up a phone and call and get access to anyone I need.”
Swientek said the Soldier Support Center was the perfect location as it’s the one building on Fort Bragg that every soldier needs to enter when they undergo a permanent change of station — what’s known as “PCSing” — to the installation.
Supporting the family supports the soldier
Jillian Rader PCSed with her husband, Joseph, an E5 soldier, to Fort Bragg six months ago from Germany. She said the installation’s EFMP, especially its play events, has been critical in socializing their 2-year-old son, Spencer.
Rader described Spencer as very shy. She said he doesn’t communicate with words, instead using babbling, pointing and other nonverbal communication methods. The average child of Spencer’s age speaks in three-word sentences, according to Stanford Medicine.
“It’s very important for him to have that environment where he feels comfortable actually playing with kids, instead of going to a park and staying there for an hour watching him watch other kids,” Rader said. “It’s made him so much more outgoing just in the little bit that we’ve done.”
EFMP has also been a safe, familiar space for Rader. She’s built connections with staff and feels they’ve gotten to know her family. She appreciates not having to reexplain Spencer’s condition to new people over and over, instead working with the same case worker since arriving at Fort Bragg.
At parks out in the community, Rader said she’s felt judged by other parents for Spencer’s timidness and disinterest in playing with other kids. At EFMP events, she’s among families who understand what it’s like to have a child with special needs.
“It’s nice with this environment because if he doesn’t talk, or if he just sits there, you don’t have any parent looking at you going, ‘Why isn’t your kid wanting to play?’” Rader said. “We all just accept that our kids are going to play how they play.”
Fort Bragg’s EFMP aims to provide all of its families with this level of comfort and support, Clark said. EFMP Family Support hosts a range of adaptive events, from movies to Easter egg hunts, and provides respite services, including its recent offering of free 30-minute massages for parents. Clark and his team regularly meet with community medical providers and support groups to stay up to date on the availability of resources.
Clark said the entire purpose of EFMP and improving it through the new centralized office is for soldiers to trust that their families are taken care of, so they can focus on their mission. It’s succeeding, according to Swientek.
“It builds readiness,” he said. “I don’t want to go on a deployment and have to worry about my daughter. I want to go and do the mission, and I think the cohesive organization [of the new EFMP office], putting them all together, lets me do that.”
Fort Bragg’s centralized EFMP office was the brainchild of former EFMP manager Amy Melendez and Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, former Commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps and current commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa. While the pair didn’t get to see the project through to its completion, Clark said Mixon and Lt. Gen. Gregory Anderson, current commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps, are pleased with the impact the centralized office has had in just the two weeks since its ribbon cutting.
Clark, who was on the family side of the EFMP while on active duty, said Fort Bragg is paving the way for other installation offices to centralize and streamline the program.
“I always say that the standard starts at Fort Bragg. If it works here, it can work somewhere else,” Clark said. “We are the largest EFMP. We are the largest installation. When things are done right here, they can be done anywhere else.”
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville.