By Joshua Qualls

[email protected]

Nestled in a tidy little cove within Funkhouser Building, the Veterans Resource Center provides a study space and serves as a community outpost for student veterans.

UK has had a longstanding partnership with various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, but it did not have a resource center for student veterans until the fall semester of 2009. That was when the Post-9/11 GI Bill, after years of deliberation in U.S. Congress, went into effect.

VRC has been located in room 124 on the first floor of Funkhouser Building since it was created. Over the years it has become increasingly difficult for the small office to handle the traffic flow.

“Space is a premium on campus and it’s just hard to come by,” said retired Army Col. Anthony Dotson, VRC’s coordinator.

Military strategy and tactics was one of the first programs taught at the university when it was founded in 1865, and it is still taught today. UK has established U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force ROTC programs since then, and the presence of military learners and military veterans has increased as the university has continued to grow.

Before VRC showed up, the UK Student Veterans Association was the only resource specific to student veterans on campus.

Dotson first arrived at UK as an Army ROTC commander and professor of military science in 2006. He retired in 2009 and took up the mantle of VRC coordinator.

He is the only staff member at VRC and the only full-time university employee who exclusively takes care of veterans, but UK has supplied him with three work-study students to handle the workload.

Over 330,000 veterans live in Kentucky, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and about 350 of those veterans are UK students.

Dotson said VRC evaluated whether policies were in place to ensure UK was not inadvertently punishing veterans for their service, so they reviewed military credit and created new policies to help appropriately transition veterans from the battlefield into a classroom.

The organization also tries to ensure VA benefits are properly processed, waives application fees, and helps to get veterans priority housing on campus.

VRC allows current and returning students to network with each other, providing office space for the student veteran community to get together and become acquainted. The organization notifies professors if students are scheduled to deploy and handles other arrangements so they can concentrate on preparing for deployment, according to its website.

Aside from his duties as VRC coordinator, Dotson also teaches a mandatory UK101 class specifically designed for student veterans. Marine Sgt. Garrett Vance, a 25-year-old electrical engineering junior, said he did not originally want to take the course, but Dotson enrolled Vance anyway and he is glad Dotson did.

Dotson began teaching the class in 2009 with about five students, he said. Student veterans who took the course had about a 72 percent retention rate compared to the 50 percent retention rate of those who did not.

The class was not mandatory for student veterans at first, and Dotson spent years collecting data and trying to prove the course’s merit through retention rate statistics before he finally convinced the university to make it a required course in the fall semester of 2014.

“Last year (the retention rate) was 96 percent from first to second semester,” Dotson said. “It’s not really as much the curriculum as much as it is connecting those veterans to other veterans, connecting them to (VRC) and to myself.”

His class has helped to improve retention rates among student veterans because it better acclimates them to college life, and it has also helped to improve their grades.

“(Dotson) genuinely cares about what happens to veterans, especially veterans here at UK,” Vance said. “He’s just a great leader.”

Dotson began asking for more space when he got the job in 2009, anticipating the center would need it.

“We pretend that area is the office area, that area is the kitchen, this area is the lounge (and) that area is the lab,” Vance said while pointing to parts of the office. “It will get so full that it will encourage some people to go away.”

The office consists of three rooms. There is a lobby area, an office for Dotson and a computer lab.

During lunch there are anywhere between 15 to 20 people trying to cram themselves into the narrow space, Vance said.

The lobby has a secretarial desk and circular table for students to use laptops and eat. It also has as a microwave for student veterans who want to prepare a quick lunch.

The computer lab was once a closet and later converted to additional work space with four computers for VRC. “It is what it is,” Vance said.

Vance, originally from Idaho, served four years on active duty and enlisted in the Marine Reserve when he was discharged in 2013. He moved to the Midwest with his wife, who has family in Kentucky, and considered going to the University of Cincinnati and the University of Louisville before deciding on UK because of VRC and the strength of the university’s engineering program.

Though he is now a student, Vance is also in the 4th Marine Division Communications Company and stationed in Cincinnati. He travels there one weekend each month for training.

Since he began studying at UK, Vance has become a familiar face for many student veterans who stop by VRC throughout the week. He does not work there, but he enjoys the company of fellow veterans and goes there often.

Vance first connected with VRC and interacted with Dotson before he began taking classes. The organization is directly involved with managing the affairs of incoming student veterans and military dependents, and it helped Vance set up his benefits and enroll in classes.

Vance and his wife live off campus, but the age difference made it difficult for him to relate to younger students at first. He said his involvement with VRC allowed him to adjust better to campus life.

“It was weird going in to freshman classes and then trying to work with (younger) guys and girls,” he said. “It was kind of frustrating but I understood where they were coming from.”

Besides being small, VRC’s current location also causes some problems for student veterans with disabilities.

Funkhouser’s position on campus requires some disabled veterans to go around to the back of the building, opposite the campus core, and take the elevator up to the first floor to get to VRC’s office. It can take a considerable amount of time to navigate for students like Marine Cpl. Matthew Bradford, a journalism junior who lost his legs and his eyesight in 2007 to an IED explosion while he was serving in Iraq.

Bradford is a bilateral amputee who now walks on prosthetic legs and relies on someone with a golf cart to get him around campus. VRC borrowed carts from Army ROTC for a while, but Bradford’s current cart was funded by UK Federal Credit Union.

Despite the lack of space in Funkhouser and its accessibility problems, Dotson has always liked its central location. Soon after he became VRC coordinator, he began walking around and trying to find places nearby that could have potential for relocation.

He eventually found a few locations and presented a list of options to the university.

“They went down the list and said, ‘Well this is going to be torn down and this is going to be torn down and … someone else is going here,’” Dotson said. “But they got to one of them and said, ‘This one might be an option.’”

The location was in the basement of Erickson Hall and, although the location has now been agreed upon, he has since been engaged in continuous negotiations to get more space out of it.

Dotson’s class is currently held in various locations across campus, but he would like to have a space in the office where he could have it in the same place each semester. Dotson said he would also like to have a mental health counselor and an office for an assistant.

“That’s my dream center,” he said. “(UK is) the flagship university for the state of Kentucky, so I would like … for us to be the model program.”

Dotson and VRC have received donations for a new office space, having raised about $415,000 since the organization started, but it will cost about $600,000 to renovate the space in Erickson Hall. Relocation and renovation of the new office space is pending approval by UK’s Board of Trustees, and Dotson hopes to have moved into the new space by the fall semester of 2016.

VRC hosts “UK Veterans Appreciation BBQ and Resource Fair” for new and returning students each semester, and Dotson sends out a weekly email blast to keep the community in the loop. Vance said these things bring out a sense of community and accountability among student veterans and, despite the location’s problems, it is a great atmosphere to be in.

“Frankly, everything about the University of Kentucky is designed around the traditional student,” Dotson said. “I think it’s important that (they) get to know our veterans because it’s just another part of diversity on campus — it’s another opportunity for you to meet someone whose life experiences are vastly different from yours, and that’s always enlightening.”