The lobby at Jackson Central-Merry High School was a busy with activity all day as graduation coach Kara Reeves organized the school’s second annual career and college fair.
Tables representing various local businesses as well as larger corporations were present along with colleges and universities as close as Lane College (just down the street) or the University of Tennessee from 300 miles away.
Representatives from those businesses and school were available with information and answers to questions that any students may have had.
KamRon Hill is the Student Government Association president at JCM.
He was one of a few students who helped make sure the career fair went well under Reeves’ coordination.
“Students in all four grades come to this because it’s a great way for freshmen and sophomores to begin to map out their own career path,” Hill said.
Hill, who is a junior, has already made his plans, which are to attend Southern University after graduating from JCM and major in either criminal justice or political science. He said he’s inspired to do all that after seeing an image of Nathan Pride on the wall of the hall upstairs at JCM, and Pride was the first Black judge in Jackson and Madison County history.
“Knowing when he grew up and when he became judge, he had to go through a lot to get to that level,” Hill said. “And if he can overcome all that he did to be a judge, what can I accomplish now?”
Diamond Douglas and Brianna Cross are a couple other juniors who helped with the coordination of the fair.
Douglas plans to attend Alabama A&M and major in sports medicine, while Cross wants to go into cosmetology and own her own business, so she’s looking at possibly going to school for both cosmetology and business school.
“Miss Reeves took some of us to a college and career fair for HBCUs in Memphis last week, and Alabama A&M was there,” Douglas said. “I knew I wanted to go into sports medicine, and I talked to their people about the sports medicine program there.”
Douglas said she’s also hopeful to be a part of the majorette program with the band at Alabama A&M.
Reeves said putting the fair together is something she’d wanted to do since coming back to JCM when it reopened in 2021.
“It helps to expose the students to different things that they’re not used to,” Reeves said. “A lot of us don’t think about the fact that things we knew at 18 years old, someone had to tell us about.
“And not everyone gets told about different colleges or careers or what’s available to them, so this is a way to make sure our students here get that exposure.”
The fair is in line with other things Reeves does including going to other fairs and taking smaller groups of students to college visit trips.
There were 32 tables at the fair at JCM, filling the lobby and putting a few tables in an adjoining area of the hallway nearby.
“Our students are engaged and asking good questions from everything I’m hearing,” Reeves said. “There’s really no telling what this can lead to for any specific student because there’s so much potential in this school.”
Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news
