A new cheer team made up of students from Detroit Leadership Academy Middle and High schools are making an impression out in the community — and could use some help to be able to achieve their goals.
The team was started by ninth grade English teacher Jennie Rose “JR” Stearns, who volunteers her time as coach. She and her husband were cheerleaders at Michigan State University, so when she started her first job at Northwestern University, she started volunteering as a cheerleading coach in the community. She liked working with youth so much that she decided to get her teaching degree from Northwestern and began her career teaching on the South Side of Chicago before coming to Detroit and joining DLA.
There was a lot of interest at DLA to start the cheerleading team. After tryouts, six sixth graders, six seventh graders, six eighth graders, and four ninth graders made the squad. They practice two days a week after school. Their first competition was a scrimmage at Sterling Heights High School on Dec. 6, where they made a great showing. “The judges told me that they were the sweetest group of girls there!” says Jennie Rose. “That made me more proud than their outstanding routine.”
They are attending four more competitions: Jan. 18 at Grosse Ile, Jan. 24 at Allen Park, Jan. 25 at Sterling Heights, which is a Cheer for a Cure event, and Feb. 1 at Romulus.
Each girl paid $55 to join the team, which covered the cost of uniforms and shoes. Jennie Rose wrote a grant on Donors Choose.org to cover other expenses which garnered $3,500 mostly from her family and friends. However, they still need to cover entrance fees to the competitions, transportation back and forth, and gym mats so Jennie Rose can safely teach them to tumble and do stunts. They have a GoFundMe website where people can donate to help cover those costs: http://www.gofundme.
The girls are also raising money for their Jan. 25 Cheer for a Cure competition, which benefits cancer research, despite the fact that many of them come from families that face financial hardships. They set a goal for $300 and donations can be made at https://cheerforacure.org/
She’s so passionate about coaching cheerleading because it had such an effect on her own education when she was a teen, she says. She describes herself as an “uncommitted” student and would not have had a lot of motivation to stay in school were it not for her extracurricular activities like cheer. They helped her find her motivation to study and she ended up graduating with a 4.2 GPA and attending a selective university and graduate school. “I strongly believe that sports and after school activities are vital to students’ commitment to school,” Jennie Rose says. “I want my students to have every opportunity I had, and many of these kids need a reason to get excited about school.”