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I live on a remote island with 1 community college that I cannot physically attend due to disability. I have been searching for online communiy college that is VRAP eligible, but very hard to find as most colleges are not familiar with this program. Does anyone know of a college that can meet VRAP requirement? Please post, thanks.

failauga

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Jun 20, 2012 20:05:19 EDT

With just 10 days before a new education benefits is launched to help unemployed veterans learn a new skill, the VA has rushed to fix a problem that could have left community colleges in 18 states and Puerto Rico ineligible for participation.

Veterans Affairs Department officials told Congress late Wednesday they were revising their eligibility criteria for community colleges to be part of the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program so that schools that offer a limited number of four-year bachelor degrees would not be left out.
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Four-year colleges and universities will remain ineligible but community colleges listed by the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Educational Statistics College Navigator as a two-year school will be covered, VA officials said in a note to the House Veterans Affairs Committee, which raised questions about eligibility on Tuesday.

VRAP, as the program is known, starts paying benefits to eligible veterans beginning on July 1, with room for 45,000 student this year and 54,000 students next year.

The program is open to unemployed veterans ages 35 to 60 who are unemployed and are not eligible for any other veterans’ education or training benefits and have not been enrolled in the previous 180 days in a government job training program. Selected veterans receive one year of Montgomery GI Bill benefits, which pay a maximum of $1,473 a month to full-time students.

Benefits are paid if veterans enroll in vocational training, apprenticeships or on-the-job training programs in one of more than 900 occupational fields that the U.S. Labor Department has determined will have more than 10,000 jobs available in the next decade.

The House Veterans Affairs Committee became concerned this week when Florida notified the panel that 23 of its 28 community colleges were not covered by the program because they offered a limited number of four-year degrees in fields such as nursing. A closer look at eligibility turned up similar problems in other states.

Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., a senior member of the committee, asked the VA to reconsider its rules. Bilirakis raised the issue at the start of a Tuesday hearing on another veterans’ subject, and the VA responded in less than 18 hours with a decision to define eligible schools.

Bilirakis said he was “pleased to learn that the VA has changed its mind.”

Including community colleges expands the program “in a way that will help veterans rather than make the process more burdensome and bureaucratic,” he said.

http://www.navytimes.com/...ing-program-vrap-062012/