PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. – When the Putnam County School District revealed a plan to close multiple schools in order to consolidate and build new ones, one school that was set to close was Robert H. Jenkins Jr. Middle School.
The prospect of the school closing immediately caught the attention of Leo and Shirley Grainger. The Graingers have made it their life’s work to honor Jenkins, a Medal of Honor recipient.
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Jenkins graduated from Palatka Central Academy, an all-Black high school, in 1967. He lived close to Leo Grainger when the two were growing up.
In 1969, while fighting in the Vietnam War, Jenkins and another private first class, Fred Ostrom, were fighting off the enemy together in a ditch when a North Vietnamese soldier threw a hand grenade at them. Jenkins immediately pushed Ostrom to the ground and jumped on top of him to shield him from the blast, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Ostrom survived but Jenkins did not. He was 20 years old.
“He saved more than my life — I have two kids,” Ostrom later said.
The two couldn’t have been more different and weren’t particularly close, Ostrom told the Tampa Bay Times in 1996. Ostrom was a young white man from New York and Jenkins was Black from small-town Florida.
“So it didn’t matter to him, his complexion, because evidently, he was colorblind in his heart,” Leo Grainger said.
Leo Grainger said Jenkins’ sacrifice is an important part of Black history that should live on.
“That was an opportunity to bring his name home to Interlachen in which he was born in 1948,” Leo Grainger said.
The school district’s plan calls for Interlachen High School and C.H. Price Middle School to merge into one school. That mean’s a new name must be chosen. The Graingers, who have helped award a scholarship in Jenkins’ name for the last 9 years, said the best way to honor Jenkins would be to name the new school after the hometown hero.
“I feel like it will trigger somebody to ask who is Robert Jenkins? And then his memory can continue on,” Shirley Grainger said.
Local leaders have already voiced support for the possibility of naming the school after Jenkins, Leo Grainger said, but there is still a long way to go.
Putnam County Superintendent Rick Surrency said school board policy calls for a naming committee to make a recommendation to the school board for the naming of new school facilities. The committee is composed of community members and a representative named by each school board member.
“As superintendent, I yield to the naming committee to consider input from the local community and consider the contributions of those whose names are being discussed. Robert H. Jenkins Jr. is a Medal of Honor winner who gave his life to save his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. Without question, his name is held in high esteem in our community,” Surrency told News4Jax in an email.
Surrency said that when Robert H. Jenkins Jr. Middle School is closed at the end of the school year, there is the possibility that the gym/community center located on the school’s campus could also bear his name.
But the Graingers said they are not stopping until the new junior-senior high school in Interlachen bears his name.
“I just believe it will come to fruition,” Shirley Grainger said. “And it just has, it just has to because he deserves to be remembered and especially in his hometown.”