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BACKGROUND:Transgender adolescents face tremendous social stress in families and schools, which often leads to

This article examines how supportive public school environments can serve as a promotional context for the development of children and adolescents from military families. The authors integrate theory and research from multiple research strands (e.g., human development, studies of at-risk youth, educational reform, goodness of fit theory, and school climate) to outline how public schools can support the development of all children and adolescents. This article provides further support for the supposition that school climates and the social-ecological contexts surrounding a school (e.g., universities, communities, school districts) have the potential to protect at-risk children and adolescents from an array of negative social, emotional, and psychological outcomes. The authors draw linkages between these research domains and the development of military children and adolescents. Promotional civilian school environments embedded within supportive and inclusive contexts can create a social infrastructure that supports the development of military children and adolescents. The authors argue that this conceptual approach can create a foundation for interventions and research that focuses on schools as normative supportive developmental settings for military children and youth during challenging times of war (e.g., deployments and multiple school transitions). This article concludes with a discussion of future directions in research on the development of military children and adolescents. Based on a heuristic conceptual model that outlines areas needing further research, the authors call for a deeper theoretical and empirical integration of school climate and external contextual factors surrounding the school. Investigating the social and organizational dynamics within these contexts can result in a more comprehensive picture of the development of military children and adolescents.

Research has found that when compared with civilian students, militaryconnected students in the United States have more negative mental health outcomes, stemming from the stress of military life events (i.e., deployment). To date, studies on military-connected youth have not examined the role of protective factors within the school environment, such as school climate, in the mental health and well-being of military-connected adolescents. Given this gap in the research on military adolescents, this study draws from a large sample of military and non-military secondary adolescents in militaryconnected schools (N = 14,943) and examines associations between school climate, military connection, deployment, and mental health. Findings show that multiple components of school climate are associated with a lower likelihood of depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation and increased likelihood of well-being among students in military-connected schools, after

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