Young Marines Classroom Opens With 'Tomorrow’s Leaders' Premiere

TRIANGLE, VA — The National Museum of the Marine Corps hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the grand opening of the Young Marines Multipurpose Classroom at the museum. The classroom will be used by groups, schools and organization for meetings and classes.

The Young Marines program partnered with the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation to sponsor the classroom. Along with serving as a meeting space, the classroom will showcase the work of the Young Marines program, a nonprofit youth education and service group for boys and girls age 8 through the completion of high school.

Young people will get to use the new classroom for group sessions when they visit the museum. In 2019, more than 53,000 children visited the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

“The Marine Corps inspired the Young Marines program as it was founded more than 60 years ago by Marine Corps Veterans,” Col. William P. Davis USMC (Ret), national executive director and CEO of the Young Marines, said in a statement. “It’s only fitting that the Young Marines has a presence here in the sacred home for Marine Corps history.”

The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place Feb. 17 at the museum, located at 18900 Jefferson Davis Highway in Triangle. After the ribbon-cutting, more than 250 Young Marines and other attendees watched the national premiere of a documentary film titled “Tomorrow’s Leaders” in the Medal of Honor Theatre at the museum.

For the making of the documentary, cameras followed youth members of the Young Marines as they met veterans in Washington D.C., Pearl Harbor, Guam and Iwo Jima. Young Marines also met in Arizona with surviving members of the WWII Navajo Code Talkers. The film was sponsored by the Marine Corps League, the Iwo Jima Association and the American Legion.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps, a public-private venture between the U.S. Marine Corps and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, opened in November 2006 and now draws more than 500,000 people annually.