NEWBERRY — The Newberry High School Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) set out to Rosemont Cemetery last Saturday to clean the headstones of veterans, and a few non-veterans, as part of their community service project.
“We wanted to do this before Veterans Day and we needed a service learning project so we thought that this would be the best service project to do,” Cadet Tyler Hill said.
Cadets broke up into groups and worked on four sections of the cemetery, cleaning between 45-50 headstones.
“We wanted to pick something that will help teach our cadets teamwork, planning skills, leadership and things like that,” Hill said.
“Being out here, we hope it can reflect in the classroom so cadets can learn to work together both in and out of the classroom,” Cadet Trabia McFall said.
McFall added that this is the first year that the JROTC has completed this kind of service project, but hopes that they can continue in the future.
“That’s one of our goals. We want this to radiate out into the community that way it’s not just us or not just the high school, it’s everybody doing something like this,” Hill said.
McFall echoed Hill saying that she hopes that this project will expand beyond the students and that more families will come out and clean headstones, whether they are veterans or not.
“These people gave their lives for this country so we could be here to do this. The families might not be able to do that, but that’s why we’re trying to help them out. We don’t want them to have to do everything, we want to help out,” Hill said.
JROTC instructor Col. Larry Heisler noted that this service learning project is an important learning tool for the cadets.
“It’s important for them to learn the value of community service and in this respect they are showing more respect for those who have served for the nation, not only those that have passed, but those who served several wars and continued to contribute to the community,” he said.
He added that the goal of the project is to teach the cadets the value of community service, along with applying skills such as leadership and teamwork.
Since this is the first year that the cadets have set out on this project, Heisler, like McFall and Hill, hopes that the community will get more involved.
“We looked around at many cemeteries around town and we selected Rosemont Cemetery because of the location. Speaking to the Board, there’s over 8,000 grave sites out here and that’s more than we can do, so this will be a continuing project for us to work through here and build a registry of what veteran is where and when they served,” Heisler said. “The big thing to remember is that the family members aren’t forgotten. There are still people that care about what they did for the community and the nation.”
