JROTC Comes to Grayson High

Grayson High rolled out with a new program this year: JROTC.

The school got the ball rolling on the U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps course over the summer when retired Col. Ron Rose and First Sergeant Franklin Brown were hired as instructors. 

"Since July we've been working to get everything fixed, and we were in a mad scramble before school started trying to get everything in order," Rose said.  

In less than a month, they had to determine the curriculum, set up classroom space and clear out an outdoor training area in order to teach the 125 students who signed up for the course.

With Rose's 30 years of experience in the army, Brown's 10 years of JROTC teaching and help from the Gwinnett County Public Schools, the Grayson JROTC program has come a long way in a short amount of time.

Their "compound" now consists of six trailers: two classrooms, boys and girls locker rooms, a supply room for uniforms and workout gear, and a battalion staff trailer for arms and weapons. 

The county, Brown and Rose also cleared out and flattened a section of bushes and grass near the football field for outdoor training. Currently, four tall wooden poles are set up for rope bridge training, and there's a four-foot wall and an eight-foot wall for climbing. They've also cleared a half-mile trail through the woods area next to the field as part of the obstacle course, too. 

But what they have now is only phase one, and there is still much to do, Rose said. They want to add obstacles such as swinging logs and a low crawl to the trail in the woods. For the cleared area next to the field, they want to build pull-up bars, six-foot box islands around each pole, and even a repel tower. Their uniforms are incomplete, and they would like a platform or boardwalk connecting the trailers for easier access, especially for students in wheelchairs. Lastly, the students need rifles, pellets and shooting targets so that they can compete as a rifle team.

Rose said he imagines the cost for most of what they need is $10,000. What they need most is wood, though. One parent has already been generous enough to donate about a thousand dollars worth of wood, but there haven't been many other donations to the program. 

Despite their unfulfilled wants, the Grayson JROTC students seem to enjoy going to class and practicing afterschool until 5 p.m. everyday.

Right now two groups of students, one all-male team and one mixed boys-and-girls team, are in raider training four days a week where they do a cross-country rescue and a rope walk. For the rescue, the cadets climb the two walls and sprint through the trail in the woods while carrying rucksacks and a stretcher. For the rope walk, the students tie a rope to two poles and travel across the rope, simulating crossing a water stream.

"They really have a lot of fun," said Rose. "It's all about teamwork. None of it is an individual thing. It's all helping each other over the wall, and helping each other on the rope." 

On the one day the students aren't raider training, they're prepping for drill team in the spring. With weapons from the arms room, the boys use 8.5-pound guns while the girls use 4-pound guns for spinning and marching with. Full training for drill team starts in November, when raider season ends. 

The students aren't doing just physical activity, though. In the classroom, the students took a practice test for the JROTC academic bowl just a few weeks ago. Rose said they'll choose the six students with the best scores at Grayson to compete with all the other army JROTC teams in the entire country. Half of the teams with the best scores go to the second round, and from there, the top 24 teams go on to compete in Washington. 

To donate to the Grayson High JROTC program, contact the school at 770-554-1071.