What is your main goal for having a military club at Vandegrift?

My main goal was to have a military presence at Vandegrift. There’s JROTC at other schools, but we don’t really have any military related stuff and having to go to another school to get that knowledge is really hard for some kids. So I wanted to be able to have almost a similar thing to JROTC for kids to have at Vandegrift, even though it doesn’t count for credit.

Why did you start this club? 

Like I said before, I want to have a military presence here, but also I want to go into the military in the future. But I couldn’t travel to a different school, so I wanted to be able to give the opportunity to people here who can’t travel.

What are some things you cover in the club?

Whenever you join, you get to pick almost a subgroup, and it’s one of the branches in the military. So, for example, I want to be in the Airforce. Then each of the groups does research about their field and presents it to the club and gives everyone information about that branch. We’re also planning on meeting with the Leander high schools who have the JROTC program to help us with Color Guard training and all that stuff. Another thing is we have people coming in from branches that are either serving, have served or are going to serve and come and talk with us about what they do, and then potentially we’re hoping to do things like visits of bases and stuff on that line.

Who has been supportive to you throughout this process?

Well Mrs. Wustrau is our club sponsor as well as Mr. Lynch, so they both helped a lot since Mr. Lynch served in the army too. And then Avery Putnam, she co-founded it with me, and she was kind of the first person I ran it by and she helped me along with that.

What do you hope to accomplish this school year?

We hope to have a color guard at football games in the future, but we want to just get a baseline down for future years so we get everything set in stone. Since we’re a new club, we want to find out what we’re gonna do, determine the goals for the club and kind of just plan stuff out.