Hixson High School Air Force JROTC Receives Distinguished Awards

The Hixson high school Air Force Junior reserves Officer Training Corps accomplished a first in its unit’s 46 year history.

Headquarters Air Force JROTC recently announced that TN’s 31 as a recipient of both the Air Force JROTC distinguished unit with merit award and the Silver Star community
service of excellence award.

Doug Burhans, “The ah… distinguished unit with merit award is a very prestigious award that we’ve never earned in the 46 year history that Hixson high schools had a Junior ROTC program. Some of the criteria for that is we have to get certain amount of community service hours. We have to make sure that we have our computer information up-to-date we don’t miss any suspense from headquarters in Montgomery Alabama. We also have to make sure that we haven’t exceed standards on our most recent unit inspection which we achieved this year for the first time ever.”

Doug, “The second award that we earned was the community service with Silver Star Award. And that’s only handed out to 5% of those nine hundred units worldwide.
And that goes to the units in the world that had the most community service hours per cadet.”

Cadet Dante Keoke , “As the first year I feel like we’ve helped out a lot especially with just the community service hours. But I’m definitely really proud and happy to say that I’m part of this group that’s done in the first last 46 years. So we’re proud of that.”

Doug, “We tell them that you don’t have to go out and and chase accolades. If you work hard and you put the effort in and you do hard work, that those accolades are going to follow you.”