High school senior Jared Dennis wants to join the U.S. Air Force. If you look at his credentials, he would appear to be someone any branch of the military would be happy to have. He has a 3.9 grade point average while taking courses like statistics and Japanese and he plays in a regional orchestra.
But when he went through the recruitment process with the Air Force, he was told he is a Tier 2 candidate because he attends an online virtual high school.
Less than 1 percent of the people the Air Force accepts can be Tier 2 candidates, which includes home-schooled students and those who earn a GED.
“It was heart-breaking, to say the least, that I put in all this time and effort looking at how I could get into the Air Force, not only for myself but to serve my nation. That’s one thing that I really want to do,” Dennis said.
He and his mother, Alice, met Wednesday with Congressman Joe Wilson, R-SC, and state superintendent Dr. Mick Zais, who’s a retired Army brigadier general.
Wilson serves as chairman of the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee, served 31 years in the National Guard and has four sons in the military. He told Dennis he’ll work to get the Department of Defense to change its policy.
“When I return next week to Washington, I’ll be working to put this in the National Defense Authorization Act,” Wilson said.
Tier 1 students are those who graduate from a traditional high school, while Tier 2 students are those with alternative credentials, like a home school diploma, a GED or a diploma from a correspondence, Internet or distance-learning program.
Tier 3 is for someone without any secondary school credential.
Non-Tier 1 applicants who are accepted are limited to no more than 10 percent in the Army, 5 percent in the Navy and Marine Corps and less than 1 percent in the Air Force.
Zais said, “The difficulty and rigor of the curriculum in our cyber schools exceeds that in many of our traditional schools. Seems to me this is probably just a policy in Washington that made sense 15 years ago when there was a lot of fly-by-night companies offering fake degrees.”
He points out that the state’s virtual charter schools have the same accreditation as brick-and-mortar schools and students take the same standardized tests.
Dennis is still hoping he’ll be able to join the Air Force. If he’s not allowed to enlist, he said he plans to go to college and join ROTC.
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