My American Dream Story

From Military School to Maryland’s Apprenticeship Incentive Program

By Maryland Governor Wes Moore, National Governors Association Vice Chair

I only have two memories of my father: The first was when I was three years old and got in trouble for hitting my older sister. My mother was so furious that my father had to protect me. He placed me on his lap and explained what I had done wrong. The second memory is watching my greatest protector die right in front of me. When I was just three years old, he collapsed on the stairs from what we later learned was acute epiglottitis. My mother suddenly became a widow raising three children alone. I cannot imagine the weight on her shoulders. She was grieving, working multiple jobs, and trying to help us make sense of it.

After my father died, my mother moved us to the Bronx to live with my grandparents. As I got older and processed what happened to my father, my anger grew. I got in too many fights, too much trouble at school, and my grades started slipping. Finally, after years of threatening to send me to military school, my mother took action.

I ran away five times in the first four days of being at Valley Forge.

My commander gave me one phone call home. I rang my mother and begged her to come get me. That’s when she told me something that changed everything: “Too many people have sacrificed in order for you to be there.”

In the military, they talk about how you can’t hit a target you can’t see. At Valley Forge Military Academy, I started to see one. My teachers, mentors, and coaches opened up a bigger world for me. They helped me understand leadership, service, and the responsibility that comes with being part of something larger than yourself. They helped me understand that the world was bigger than what was directly in front of me.

After I earned my two-year degree at Valley Forge Military College and was commissioned as an Army officer, I went to Johns Hopkins University to study international relations. Later, I studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. At every stage, my world and my aperture widened further.

I realized that I am here because there were people who were willing to lift me up on their shoulders. People who were willing to hold my dreams up long enough to wait for my shoulders to become broad enough to carry them myself.

In 2005, I left the world of finance and deployed to Afghanistan as a part of the 82nd Airborne Division. In the Army, you have an obligation to make sure everyone makes it through. Your mission depends on it. And I walked away with a mission statement that has since become my governance philosophy: Leave no one behind.

That belief shaped everything that came after. It shaped my service as a White House Fellow. It shaped my time leading Robin Hood—one of the largest poverty fighting organizations in the country. And it shapes how I think about my service now as governor of Maryland.

When we came to office, we worked to create more pathways to work, wages, and wealth. We cut the red tape. We launched programs to get liquidity in the hands of entrepreneurs.

We invested in our public schools, invested in our universities, invested in our community colleges. And we built pathways to good careers, like our first-in-the-nation Service Year Option here in the State of Maryland.

We partnered with the trades and employers to graduate over 5,000 apprentices—and we are going to be graduating 4,000 high schoolers with Registered Apprenticeships each year by 2030. To achieve this, we launched the Maryland Apprenticeship Incentive Program, a $5 million initiative to help employers hire and train registered apprentices across our state.

We are focused on making Maryland the best place in the world to change the world.

To do that, we must Leave No One Behind. Because I know this mission—our mission—is intertwined with the American Dream.

And I know I am my ancestors’ wildest dream.

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Governor Wes Moore serves as the 63rd Governor of Maryland and as Vice Chair of the National Governors Association. An Army veteran, Rhodes Scholar, and former CEO of Robin Hood, he is the author of “The Other Wes Moore” and leads Maryland’s efforts to create pathways to opportunity for all its residents.

To learn more about the Maryland Apprenticeship Incentive Program, visit labor.maryland.gov.