At the Freedom Award ceremony, Slippery Rock University assistant professor Gary Clark, left, and Steve Austin, the Assistant Chief of the Army Reserve, meet.

Slippery Rock University students send care packages and cards to assistant professor Gary Clark when he is deployed as a member of the Army Reserves and fellow instructors teach the classes he can't when he is called to duty.

But that's not why he nominated the university for a Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award, which the school won.

The Department of Defense annually presents the awards through its Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve program to employers who support their employees serving in the National Guard and Reserves.

“I've been at Slippery Rock for I guess 10 years now. I've been deployed twice. Both the faculty and staff have been great filling in for me, but this is more about other things I see at the university,” said Clark, an assistant professor in the physical and health education department.

Students in the campus chapter of Student Veterans of America raised money to provide and train a service dog for a student-veteran, the school's Storm Harbor Equestrian Center provides therapy programs for disabled veterans and the school hosts an annual Veterans Day service.

Clark said he was on a deployment last year when he was inspired to fill out and submit an award nomination for the university.

“Slippery Rock does a lot of stuff that nobody probably knows about. A veritable plethora of things. I submitted the nomination while deployed in Iraq last year. I wrote up what I thought,” he said.

Find out more in Sunday's Butler Eagle.