Kaheem Bailey-Taylor was leaving a party last August at a cousin’s house in Northern Philadelphia when he heard gunshots. “The suspect started shooting out the door towards us,” he says. Police soon arrived and cleared the house. Mr. Bailey-Taylor followed officers in to assess the situation. Minutes later, he was sitting in the back of a police car applying pressure to a partygoer’s gunshot wounds.
Mr. Bailey-Taylor isn’t a paramedic or a cop; he’s a 17-year-old high-school junior. He is cadet colonel at the Philadelphia Military Academy, where all students are enrolled in the U.S. Army’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program. On my visit to the academy, Mr. Bailey-Taylor helps show me around. As we sit in the back of a 10th-grade class on first aid, he leans over and tells me that he used these skills, along with his lifeguard training, the night he helped save the partygoer, one of his classmates.
The class starts like any other, with the buzz of chatty students. It then cuts to silence in unison as a student leader takes his position at the front. Then students recite the cadet creed in one voice: “I will always conduct myself to bring credit to my family, country, school and the Corps of Cadets. I am loyal and patriotic. . . . I will seek the mantle of leadership and stand prepared to uphold the Constitution and the American way of life. May God grant me the strength to always live by this creed.”