Gloucester High School’s Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps Program dates to 1888, but this year it’s undergoing a sea change.
The program is transitioning from a Marine Corps unit to a Navy one under new leadership by Chief Mark Robinson of Gloucester, a Coast Guard veteran who retired last year from the service after 20 years.
The program has 58 cadets in all grade levels at the high school, with four seniors, he said.
Superintendent Ben Lummis, updating the School Committee, said the NJROTC Program recently completed and passed its area manager inspection report.
The program had been reviewed in areas of administration, reporting and records, cadet performance and college and career readiness. Lummis noted that under Robinson the Gloucester NJROTC passed inspection in all categories.
During his presentation, Lummis thanked Robinson, a first-year instructor, as he goes about rebuilding the program. He noted that Robinson has been “an exceptional addition to the Gloucester High School staff.”
Principal James Cook wrote in the NJROTC and NNDCC instructor evaluation, contained in the School Committee’s packet: “Chief Robinson is an exceptional addition to the Gloucester High School faculty. Most importantly, he connects well with cadets and holds them accountable in a way that helps them grow.”
NNDCC stands for Navy National Defense Cadet Corps under which the Gloucester High program falls. Both the NJROTC and NNDCC programs are the same according to their curriculum, but the distinction means the program has a local funding component.
Lummis said the program is building toward becoming a full NJROTC program.
Uniform day
Last Thursday was uniform day for the program, which is the day of the week the cadets wear their uniforms in school.
Robinson wears his from the Coast Guard.
About 1:30 p.m., the cadets, mostly freshmen with some sophomores, juniors and seniors, stood in the high school’s field house undergoing a uniform inspection.
There are certain criteria about what to wear and how to wear it with their name tag, ribbons they’ve earned or the stars for the years they have been in the program displayed on their uniform, Robinson said.
When the cadet leading the inspection, Senior Chief Petty Officer Aiden Spoon, dismissed his fellow cadets after their inspection, and they stepped out of line out of order. Robinson did not like what he saw.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s do that again. Come on, that was awful. We know better.”
They did it again, and Robinson pronounced: “Better.”
Petty Officer Marisa Todd, 15, a sophomore, said she likes the program, but she’s unsure if she wants to serve in the military.
Spoon, a junior, said he’s interested in the military, and he’s eyeing the Marine Corps, though he notes it’s “kind of rigorous.”
“I like it because I’ve made a lot of friends I would have never made if I never did ROTC,” he said. “There is a lot of people in there that are unlikely to be together in one group, but we are all in one group in ROTC.”
Spoon, 17, said he enjoyed drill team last year, but his schedule is too heavy this year to do that again.
“The class itself is really fun, too, I think,” he said. As part of the program, during Thanksgiving, Spoon and a couple of other cadets helped prepare free meals at The Open Door food pantry on Emerson Avenue.
A lot of what the cadets do is academics, Robinson said.
“The Navy is very big on the knowledge piece, whether that’s history, civil service, military law, military justice, science, naval science, maritime laws, maritime navigation, stuff like that,” he said. Three days are given over to study, the fourth day is uniform day, and the fifth revolves around physical fitness.
Big shoes to fill
All JROTC programs are sponsored by different branches of the military, and when the Marine Corps decided to go to a different school, the Navy took over the Gloucester program, Robinson said.
He noted Gloucester’s program, founded in 1888, was for the longest time part of the Army. Hanging in the school’s front atrium are two large metal William Randolph Hearst trophies for the National R.O.T.C. Rifle Match Eastern Championship for 1930 and 1932.
There was a brief time in the late 1980s when there was no program at the high school before the Marine Corps picked it up in 1996, Robinson said.
“So this is really part of history for this town. A JROTC program has been here longer than some states” have existed, he said.
The program was overseen for 23 years by Marine Corps gunner Richard Muth, who retired from the job in the spring of 2019, according to a story on the Gloucester High news site, The Gillnetter.
“He did a lot of great work. All of these achievements, all of these plaques, all of these medals” Robinson said looking around the JROTC classroom, “are from him during his era here. So, a huge legacy as far as that goes. So, really filling big shoes in that respect.”
Changing over the program from one branch to another has been challenging for some students because they went from one way of doing things to another, Robinson said.
“They have done very well with that respect,” he said. The program is not a recruitment program for the military, he added, rather it’s a citizen development program.
“What we are trying to do is give them an experience they wouldn’t otherwise have.”
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Source: American Military News
