JROTC, Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, is an army-based, nationwide organization for high school students. PHS has a JROTC club led by Mr. Timothy Heine and junior Allison LeBlanc. Here is what JROTC is all about.

Q: What does JROTC do?

Heine: It’s a national program. It’s funded by the Department of Defense, and it’s a way to get students familiar with leadership roles and discipline and confidence and things like that, and it also has the benefit that if you know a student wants to or is thinking about becoming an officer in the military, they can go through the JROTC in college. So it’s a great stepping stool to get into college for those programs to become an officer.

LeBlanc: It gives people these skills that they will not acquire during other extracurriculars, such [as] leadership, especially, like, you need to know how to basically be in charge of people. Like, it’s just a leadership … it beats around the bush of military, but you do not have to be interested [in the] military to join.

Q: How would a PHS student join?

Heine: So, all they really need to do is either get a hold of Allison LeBlanc, who is our cadet commander for our JROTC club, or they can come to one of our meetings on Tuesday morning. We meet at 7:10, right back here underneath the space shuttle, and we usually have about a 30-minute meeting on Tuesday mornings, and they can show up for those.

Q: What would a PHS student do when they joined?

Heine: We do meetings every Tuesday morning. Some of those meetings will consist of doing physical training, so going out, doing running out on the track, or doing exercises in the gym, if we can get in there, but we also do leadership classes we go over. We’re gonna try and go over some first aid stuff, like trying to a basic first aid style class, and then drilling ceremony, because we’re trying to get a color guard established within the JROTC so we can present colors for games and different activities here at the school. Those are the different things that we can do, we have other fun events planned. 

LeBlanc: So, we do PT [Physical Training] every three weeks, and so we were supposed to do it today, but Heine wasn’t able to show up, but we have these blue books that we’re gonna go over.

Q: Why should PHS students join?

Heine: If we were able to establish an actual JROTC class, because right now we don’t have the school population to have an actual full class, but if we were able to, students that were in the JROTC, it makes it easier for them to get JROTC scholarships, or other scholarships that are meant for students who want to go to either an A&M college or one of the military academies. My biggest one was the leadership aspect of it because I spent 21 years in the military, so it’s the leadership part of it all is what’s great because you get that confidence, you get that leadership, it makes you a better citizen. I just want to make sure that students know that if they join the JROTC club, it does not mean that they are joining the military. [We] want students to come and have fun with this, say, we’ve got events planned that we want to do, and it would be better if we had more students to help out with. We do have classes and things like that, and it is something that if they join now, and we can get a school population for it, we could have a dedicated JROTC class in the school as part of the curriculum. 

LeBlanc:  I mean, it’s an amazing club. This, if we get, like a specific number of people, this club can actually start turning into class. This class will be able to travel around the whole state of Wyoming, competing like in [a] drilling ceremony, like marching, that’s really cool. It’s an amazing club.