Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he will explore the question of whether the Defense Department could operate schools on more military installations in the U.S.Gates spoke to 14 military parents representing nine families at Fort Belvoir, Va., on Tuesday as part of a back-to-school event to get input from military parents. The parents expressed a variety of concerns about the education of their children, including the varying quality of public schools.About 44 percent of service members have children, totaling 1.2 million kids across the active-duty force. But only about 85,000 children go to school at Defense Department schools — 25,000 in the stateside schools and 60,000 overseas. The vast majority of stateside-based military children go to public schools.“These parents would love to have [Defense Department] schools on post, and re-expand the DoD education program,” Gates said.Not only would the parents like to see teachers and counselors who have an understanding of the challenges that military children face, but they’d be “surrounded with peers who are going through the same thing,” he said.“One question I’ll ask is at least at the big posts where we have a lot of repeated rotations, such as Fort Bliss, Fort Drum, Fort Hood, Fort Lewis … could we at least do elementary schools?” Gates said. “I’m sure there were good reasons for reducing the number of DoD schools years ago, but that’s something we can at least look into.”Gates noted that he doesn’t know whether the idea would be politically or financially possible.