COLUMBIA, S.C. (WRDW/WAGT) – State leaders gathered in Columbia on Thursday for the Governor’s Annual Veterans Affairs Summit.

Among their priorities for the coming year are pleas with the state legislature to help veterans in South Carolina.

One bill the Department of Veterans Affairs would like to consider is a bill that would help military families enroll in charter schools.

“We have military families who come here on orders, they don’t usually get orders until late spring, but the charter school lotteries are usually in January, February,” said Veterans Affairs Secretary Todd McCaffrey. “It was close last year. We’d like to see that move forward this year because the military families we want to attract to stay in South Carolina are part of that process.”

The bill was not passed during this year’s legislative session.

Nor was there one that required the General Assembly to allocate enough money for every Veterans Affairs office in the state to have two full-time employees.

“These are not state employees. These are county employees, and counties have different levels of ability to raise resources. Counties that are a little more affluent can obviously hire more people who work in the county,” McCaffrey said.

At these offices, for example, veterans can access resources and get assistance in applying for federal benefits.

Rural counties in particular have difficulty staffing these offices full-time, forcing veterans to wait for an office to open to get help… or drive miles away to an office in another county.

“If you’re one person in a county Veterans Affairs office and you have a staff or you have secured funding that only allows you to operate the office three-quarters of the time, and in some cases less, it can be very, very difficult,” said Dwight Bradham, a veterans affairs office worker in Aiken County.

Governor Henry McMaster says it’s crucial that veterans are aware of and have access to the benefits they are entitled to under the law.

“But we also need to make sure they have access to jobs, to education, to all of those things,” McMaster said.

The General Assembly will be able to take up new bills when it returns to Columbia, where the regular legislative session begins in January.

One of the South Carolina Department of Veterans Affairs’ priorities for the coming year is to complete the transformation of veterans’ nursing homes.

They were previously under the Department of Mental Health but were taken over in July of this year by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which expects the transition to be complete by July of next year.

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