Forest Hill Military Academy To Temporarily Close; Reopen As Millersburg Military Institute

Cadets who are participants of the CADET-13 program, our dual college-high school credit program, will be retained to finish their school year.

The school plans to reopen again in August of 2015 and will be renamed Millersburg Military Institute.

For 113 years, the historical Millersburg Military Institute (MMI) stood on the ground which is now Forest Hill Military Academy (FHMA).  

In 2006 MMI closed.  In 2008, the U.S. Army Cadet Corps (USAC) bought the property and redesignated the land as Forest Hill Station, and the National Cadet Training Center. They opened FHMA in 2012.

USAC, which is in the process of rebranding itself as the American Military Cadet Corps (AMCC), is a 106-year-old volunteer military cadetting organization which has active training units in Kentucky, Maryland, and Michigan, and has a cooperative agreement with the New York Grey Cadets in New York, NY.  

AMCC is also is the parent company of Military Adventure Camp, a military-style camp for youth ages 12 – 18.  

Over an 8-week period during the summer, some 275 plus campers from all over the world come to Millersburg to have a realistic military experience.  

"Although we still believe that there is a strong need for a military academy in Kentucky, as a business, FHMA was ill conceived by our previous leadership,” stated the school’s Headmaster, Jay Whitehead. “It has never been financially viable and has had to be subsidized by our other business ventures. To put the school on hiatus for a semester will allow us to set our financial house in order and begin anew." It also allows for the school to “reorganize and rebuild the trust of the community, as well as give us an opportunity recruit top students who have aspirations for attending higher education or one of the U.S. military service academies.”

The renaming of the school back to MMI has had a very positive response from the community.

Millersburg City Mayor Nathan Zingg believes that a military school in Millersburg is an important part of the city’s success and history. “Forest Hill’s new leadership has had to make some difficult financial decisions to overcome some of their issues of the past.  We look forward to their reemergence next school year as Millersburg Military Institute." 

USAC/AMCC will continue to run their unit and summer programs, as well as the scheduled Winter Pathfinder course scheduled to start on December 28^th through January 3^rd.

This move allows for the AMCC program as a whole to reset and get back to the original mission of the AMCC: cadetting. “We don’t want that to go away,” said Whitehead. “History demands that we work hard to save and rebuild this program, so that a long lasting tradition in this nation doesn’t die. We have an opportunity to do that right now. And we will.”