Students find their place in Comeaux High NJROTC program
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When she was little, 16-year-old Sydney Liles wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, join the Marine Corps or become president of the United States — maybe all three. Then she was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a degenerative nerve disease, at age 12.
"It was really hard, because I had big dreams," she said. "Some of those are not possible anymore. (CMT) affects all my nerves and muscles in my body. It affects everything — my walking, talking, writing."
But she's still chasing dreams and accomplishing them with help from her two families — her biological family and the one she's found in her school's Naval Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (NJROTC) program. The two actually overlap, as her twin brother Charles also is a cadet.