Arlington High School is experiencing a lot of emotions as 7 staff members are leaving or retiring this year. JROTC is one of the many programs losing a very important role. This year has gone great with competitions but students start to worry how it will affect next year as the replacement comes in. Will it?
Brooklyn Barnes, a sophomore, has shared her feelings about how this year went and how next year will go. Being in JROTC for two years has given her experience of what it is like.
“I feel like this year has gone really successful. I feel like all of our competitions have been placed really good. We even went to nationals,” Barnes said.
Many people have said that this year has been great in both competitions and people. They’ve gotten to build relationships with their peers as well as their instructors.
“I’ve been able to serve as the Squadron Commander, which is the leader of the entire cadet corps. And we’ve been able to make it super efficient. I believe that all of our Color Guard events, all the events that we’ve done for the school, for the community, have gone really well. We’ve had a lot of successful fundraisers. We’ve had a really successful competition year for all of our competition teams overall. It went pretty well,” Jack Dewid (‘28) said.
As Major Blue leaves, cadets are going to have to navigate how to handle the change and step up to help the replacement see how they do it and the cadets are going to have to get used to change within the program.
“I think the other cadets are going to obviously miss him [Blue]. I think he definitely brings the light to the program. Especially since he founded it, I think it’s going to be definitely a big change that they’ve never faced before. The cadets are going to have to take on a much larger role than they usually have, which I think is a little scary, but also kind of exciting,” Cecilia Shelton (‘26) said.
The statement “Trial and Error” has come up a lot when talking about the new adjustment. New things are fun and can leave you with amazing memories and knowledge learning what works and what needs to improve.
“I believe it’s going to make a really big change because Major Blue knows a lot about the Corps, and he’s able to keep us in check when we’re falling off. He knows a lot about the events that we do, and he knows a lot of connections that can certainly help us with those events. We’re getting a new instructor next year that has never taught JROTC before, so it’s going to be entirely new to him. And our current assistant instructor, who is directly below the major, he still has only been here for two years, so he’s still learning. We’re going to lose a lot of our knowledge about JROTC with him leaving, so he’s been trying to prepare us all for that, just giving us more insight in it,” said Dewid.
Even though everyone is sad about Blue leaving, there is a lot of excitement in the program to get more knowledge from another instructor. Rob Pederson is the instructor stepping in.
“He retired as a Colonel in the Air Force, so he was one of the higher-ranking officers. He was in charge of an entire base, so roughly 100,000 people. I got to personally interview him when he was first being interviewed for the position.
He answered every question with confidence and certainly showed a level of strategy that you wouldn’t expect. He is a family man, from what I learned. He really cares about the Corps. Something I’m really nervous about is how he’s going to talk to the cadets, because so far, he’s only taught adults, not kids below the age of 18. I think he’s going to be a phenomenal leader, but it’s going to take time for him to get adjusted to teaching high schoolers,” Dewid said.
Major Blue has put this program in good hands. He has put so much time and effort into JROTC and everyone is sad to see him go but he deserves to retire. Arlington high school will miss him.
“I’m happy that he’s finally being able to retire after like 20 years in the service, and then 20 years here at the school. And I’m definitely grateful that he’s going to be coming back for some of the teams, so he’s not going to be completely gone. But we’re all going to really miss him,” Shelton said.
