New facility will expand ROTC possibilities
The Reserve Officers' Training Corps at Slippery Rock University is on its way to breaking a record for graduating seniors in 2025.
While recruitment for the program stalled in 2020 and 2021, Lt. Col. Jennifer Martin, military science department chairwoman and professor at SRU, said there are already 28 first-year students involved in ROTC this year. In 2020, a record of 30 students graduated from the program.
With the $850,000 grant the university received through the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program to build a new facility for the program and university police, Martin said she thinks the ROTC will see an uptick in participation in the coming years.
“We actually need to expand due to the fact that we are getting new cadets,” Martin said. “We have hodgepodge areas all over campus; we have offices we are about to grow out of … We'll actually have a consolidated place to train.”
According to Martin, the ROTC program has classes taking place in other university facilities.
Martin said planning for a new facility began around 2019 with the previous department chairman, Joseph Ritchie. The new RACP grant will be added to the previous $750,000 RACP grant the university received last year, and both amounts are being matched by the SRU Foundation.
These grants will help fund the first phase of a larger project that will house SRU's U.S. Army ROTC program in the same 26,560-square-foot facility as the university police, according to a Dec. 5 news release from the university.
Martin said that although the ROTC program will still be sharing a space, having a dedicated facility that is also brand new will do a lot for recruitment for the program.
“We don't have a dedicated facility we can bring all the cadets into at one time and do hands-on training,” Martin said. “We've lost recruitment to other schools with better facilities. Aesthetics can bring people to a place.”
Martin said there are more than 100 students this year who are either enrolled in or take classes in the ROTC program. There are also 11 staff members for the program.
One of the main inconveniences of not having a dedicated location for ROTC is the lack of storage for equipment, which the new facility will rectify.
“Our storage won't be in three different buildings, which is nice,” Martin said. “We have a shed we go in three times a week, we are in there a lot. We are actually going to have a warehouse.”
Work on the project is expected to begin in summer 2023, and Martin said she hopes it will be completed and ready for student use before she retires in 2024.
“The whole thing, just the space in general. The gymnasium, the drill halls, the lecture halls, us not being in some rundown house,” Martin said. “I would love to see it happen before the fall semester of 2024.”
