‘Servant leader’ standout in St. Martin ROTC bound for Naval Academy. Meet Savéair Kemp.
One weekend not too long ago, Dina Holland drove past St. Martin High School, where she is the principal, and saw something unusual.
A student was picking trash up from the lawn at the front of the school. No one had told him to do it, but there he was: senior and Air Force JROTC Group Commander Savéair Kemp, cleaning up a mess he had nothing to do with, just because he felt he should.
Holland was not entirely surprised.
“Everything that is good and wholesome — that describes Savéair Kemp,” she wrote in an email.
“This young man is one of the most genuine human beings that I have ever met. His level of maturity, integrity, character and dedication brought to everything that he involved in is stellar.”
Kemp is not the kind of teenager who would tell this story about himself, and if Holland had not happened to drive by and see him, it’s possible no one would have ever who cleaned the school lawn that day.
The Sun Herald heard the anecdote from senior aerospace science instructor John Ladner, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, who heard it from Holland.
“He didn’t come telling me, look what I did,” Ladner said. “I said Savéair, that’s outstanding. To have the initiative and desire, but not do it to say, look what I did — you’re proud of your school and you didn’t want to leave it that way. To me that says a lot about his character.”
Headed to the Naval Academy
Ladner has known Kemp for about four years and seen him rise through the ranks of St. Martin’s JROTC program to group commander.
After graduation, he’s headed to Annapolis, Maryland, to attend the Naval Academy prep school and then the Naval Academy. The acceptance is the culmination of four years of hard work and dreaming about the future.
“I started off really wanting to go to the Naval Academy when I was a freshman,” he said. “I just went with my gut feeling —where I always wanted to be at.”
He also was accepted to the Air Force Academy prep school. And he was one of about 100 high school ROTC participants around the world to receive a full scholarship to an HBCU (Historically Black College or University).
Kemp said he originally decided to do ROTC because his siblings had done it, and his father, John Kemp, had a long career in the military.
“He was the whole reason I wanted to join the military,” Kemp said.
Ladner said Kemp is a “servant leader” who commands the respect of his peers in ROTC, and is well-liked, too.
“He gets things done,” Ladner said. “I believe that’s the best kind of leader — one who is able to do that, and show compassion. He gets along well with everybody. Not everyone can do that. I don’t mean as a people pleaser, as someone who can relate to a lot of different people.”
Planning a career of service
Kemp said he hopes that after commissioning into the Navy, he’ll work the full 20 years to retire, or transition into a government agency like the FBI, the CIA or Homeland Security.
Kemp remains as low-key about his achievements as he is about that day he cleaned up the school yard.
When a reporter asked about it, he explained that he’d gone to the school to work out at the track that day. He saw that the front lawn was “covered in toilet paper,” apparently from a senior prank of some kind.
“If you’re gonna do a spirit week prank, you should probably do it on another school and not your own,” he said. ”It didn’t make sense to me.”
He decided that if the paper was still there when he finished his workout, he’d pick it up.
“I get back and it’s still there of course,” he said. “So I pick it up. It gave me something to do, so I’m not complaining.”
Do you know a standout 2021 graduate in South Mississippi? Let us know! Email itaft@sunherald.com with as many details as possible.
