National Road Yard Sale

Nokomis JROTC team holding yard sale to raise money for Florida competition

NEWPORT, Maine — As a sophomore at Nokomis Regional High School, Stephanie Taylor had an enjoyable experience at a national Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps competition in Florida.

Taylor is hoping to make similar memories this coming year as a senior, and she and her fellow JROTC members are holding a yard sale over the weekend to raise money to attend the competition in Daytona Beach next April.

The competition features two days of weapons demonstrations and two days of flag brandishing, Taylor said.

“You have six instructors watching you,” she said. “They can even stand in front of you and have you keep on going. It’s pretty difficult.”

Taylor and her fellow JROTC members will be judged on a variety of things.

“They’re going to judge us on alignment, on every single person. Both of the weapon bearers have to be in sync,” she said.

The JROTC has made it a goal to come up with the funds by the end of the year.

“Our mission is to raise $4,000 by the end of December,” said Taylor, who is putting together the yard sale along with her mother, Pam.

The sale will be held from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday at the Plymouth Store.

The team typically travels to Florida by passenger van, Taylor said, and funds are needed to cover costs such as gasoline and lodging.

However, the long road trip of approximately 1,460 miles from Newport to Daytona Beach  gives the team a chance to become more unified.

“That’s really good for the team because we have a lot of team bonding [activities] and we really get to know each other,” said Taylor.

The JROTC will be selling a little bit of everything in the yard sale, which will be held rain or shine.

“We’re going to be selling anything from little kid toys to antiques to yard stuff,” said Taylor.

Those aforementioned items are being donated by people in the community, Taylor said, and team members are also donating items, such as old clothes.

Taylor drew up the fundraiser idea from one of her family’s summertime traditions.

“We just sat down together and we thought about a bunch of different ways to raise money,” she said. “Our family, we go down to Warrensburg, New York, every year for this big yard sale. It gave us the idea to do a yard sale to raise money.”

Nokomis’ JROTC program currently consists of 60 cadets, but that number is expected to grow once the school year starts in September.

Barbara Shoup: National Road Yard Sale

Barbara Shoup is a novelist, a teacher, and the Executive Director of the Writers’ Center of Indiana. Her young adult novels Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony were American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Vermeer’s Daughter was a School Library Journal Best Book for High School Students. She was the winner of the 2006 PEN Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for Everything You Want , published by FLUX in 2008. www.barbarashoup.

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