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The Calhoun School’s Junior Officer Training Corps (JROTC) Tiger Battalion recently completed a service project to honor and maintain the school’s legacy of excellence.

Led by their JROTC instructor, SGM Lenora White, cadets volunteered their time to clean up the burial site of the school’s founder Charlotte Thorne, who worked alongside Mabel Dillingham from New England and Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute to create the Calhoun Colored School in 1982. The project, conducted at the gravesite on the school’s campus, was the group’s annual service project and an effort to honor a woman who dedicated her life to provide education for rural Black students living in Lowndes County.

“Last year, we did Meals on Wheels, where we fed the elderly,” White said. “This year, as they were doing a briefing, they talked about how a lot of alumni visit the school and go to the site of Charlotte Thorn’s grave.”

White described how she took cadets on an outing to the site and discussed how the man who had formerly cared for the grave was no longer able to perform the upkeep.

“So, we said, ‘This is going to be a project that we can do to keep it up, to keep it beautiful,’” White said.

As part of the project, cadets pulled weeks, cut the grass and painted the fence. A few felt uncertain about tending to a grave, White explained, but once they started working and witnessed the results, students enjoyed the feeling of giving back to preserve Thorn’s and the school’s legacy.

“They were inspired,” White said. “They said they couldn’t believe a Caucasian woman would come to the Black Belt and put so much into the area.”

Cadet Lt. Col Kelmaree Speigner, the battalion commander, said the project opened his eyes to Thorn’s selfless service.

“For me, it was really eye opening,” he said. “She was someone who helped build the school up, and that gave me more appreciation towards her. I felt really grateful and really good about cleaning off her grave.”

The effort was a teambuilding experience, too, Speigner said, because new cadets worked alongside more experienced students, building relationships as a battalion.

“We’re a family together,” he said. “We work together in order to build and make a more connected Tiger Battalion.”

Layla Olyphant moved from Florida to Lowndes County four years ago. Learning of Thorn’s efforts helped her understand the community, she said.

“For me, to come to the school and learn about what she did in the community really inspired me to want to do more for my peers,” Olyphant said.

Joshua Simmons, Jr. echoed Speigner’s appreciation for Thorn’s work and emphasized the significance of completing the service project on the school’s campus.

“The grave site is a very significant part of our school,” Simmons said. “We usually go out and do things, like with the elderly, and help give back to the community, but being able to actually be on our campus and clean the grave, it really sinks in to the students and makes them feel better about themselves. [Thorn] did a lot for the school, obviously, and being able to actually make her grave look presentable for others, if anyone wants to visit, it just goes to show how [much] we care.”