Catching up with Jeffrey Jensen

Posted

Catching up with Jeffrey Jensen is no easy thing to do. The kid is busy.

Jensen is a high-drive junior at Page High School. This time of year, he plays wing and midfield on the soccer team. This winter, you’ll find him on the wrestling mat, next spring he’ll be behind the plate catching for the Sand Devils baseball team, and during the summer he works at Ace in its garden center.

Last year, Jensen also played violin in the high school orchestra, but he had to drop it this year; he had no place to fit it in his already packed schedule. Despite his busy extra-curricular schedule, Jensen still finds time to maintain a 3.6 GPA.

“I’ve gotten pretty good at Google calendar,” he said. “It’s keeps me organized and everything flowing.”

In a year filled with accomplishments, one of Jensen’s biggest was earning his Eagle Scout last December. He was given the award in June during a Court of Honor. His Eagle Project earned him state-wide recognition from the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For his Eagle Project, Jensen placed military markers on the graves of every veteran buried in the Page Cemetery that didn’t already have markers showing their military service. To complete the project, Jensen worked closely with Sue Specht and the City of Page, to make sure none of the veterans buried in the Page Cemetery were missed. 

“He did a great job,” said Frena Crane, Troop 7911’s committee chair and Eagle advisor. “Jeffrey is the kind of person who is quietly ambitious. He gets the job done but doesn’t make a big fuss about it.”

After Jensen received the list of every veteran in the Page Cemetery, he and Specht went through and checked every grave. Some of the graves already had a veteran’s marker, but when they found one that didn’t, he added it to a list for later. A short time after locating the graves, Jensen organized a work crew and made plans to return and complete the job. When Jensen and his crew returned, they added veterans’ markers to every veteran’s grave that didn’t already have one. The crew also cleaned the headstone and grave site of each veteran and uploaded the veteran’s name and the location of their grave to billiongraves.com, a website that seeks to track the burial sites of every American serviceman and woman.

“It was a very worthy project,” Crane said. “He went above and beyond on this. He accomplished something for the community, the state, the country and the world with this.”

Jensen’s Eagle Project garnered him a lot of recognition and praise throughout the state. He won second place for Scout of the Year, and the City of Page also recognized Jensen for his outstanding work. The VFW, at the state level, also has plans to recognize Jensen for his service to Arizona veterans and his work getting their names added to billiongraves.com.

Though only a high school junior, Jensen already has his next few years planned out.

“I’m planning on going to college for flight school to fly commercial jets as a career,” he said. “It sounds fun, and you get paid a lot of money. That’s a nice combination.”