Civil Air Patrol Open House!

For the past couple of months, my squadron has been planning a squadron open house. The staff has had several meetings, we made up the schedule, we promoted it, and Thursday night, we had it! I think it was a definite success. My unofficial count of the attendees (not cadets) was around 30, with a possibilty of three kids signing up.



We had our color guard present the colors, and then everybody mingled, looked at our displays, ate cookies, and chatted. From there, we had a Moral Leadership class for cadets and perspective cadets, and for the rest, we had our flight simulator. During this class period, we had an unofficial staff meeting to decide that we wanted to have a full closing ceremony, instead of simply retiring the colors. I realize that some of you may not be quite following the terminology here, but if you have any questions, leave me a comment. Anyhow, we then had a more official staff meeting (meaning all the staff memebers were present, instead of just four) to officially decide that we were going to do a full closing ceremony with retiring the colors, indoors. With that out of the way, we all then went down to the lower lobby to hear all the presentations. Our squadron commander, cadet commander, Alpha flight commander, the senior who started the squadron in 1965, and our safety officer/sometimes-deputy squadron commander all spoke. This lasted about a half an hour. Following this, we had our closing and retiring the colors.

The closing ceremony went fairly well once we got it under way. Afterwards, we had cleaning up to do, and then we went home. If/when we have our next one, we will have a much better idea of what to expect. Most people (maybe even all people) came from word of mouth promoting, mostly from cadets who go to school with their children. Also, I think that having Moral Leadership as a class wasn't the best choice, but it worked. We had many well-put-together members who were able to go with it and make it work.

If you are interested in learning more about CAP, go to www.cap.gov