It wasn’t only the Jesse White Tumblers who needed courage as they showed off their jumps, leaps and somersaults Thursday on a hard asphalt playground outside Highland Elementary School in Elgin.
As Highland Principal Steve Johnson and Gail Borden Public Library staffer Jennifer Bueche stood one behind the other, forming an obstacle close to 6 feet tall, the tumblers from Chicago ran straight at them, jumped onto a small trampoline and catapulted their bodies high over Johnson’s and Bueche’s heads before landing on a soft but narrow cushioned mat.
And even that trick would be bested a few minutes later. The tumblers did an exercise where they jumped over each other as they stood shoulder to shoulder in a line. As each athlete finished his or her jump, he would join the line, so the line that the next tumbler had to jump over would be one person wider. Finally, the last guy to run up, 23-year-old Leandrew Collins, had to jump over all 17 others, standing side by side, to get down to safety on that landing mat.
The Chicago tumbling team visited Highland because, for the third year in a row, its students won last year’s Dr. Torres Community Summer Reading Challenge. The program is sponsored by Elgin School District U46 and local library districts to encourage children to read while classes are out for the summer. A bigger percentage of students from Highland had read the minimum number of library books than those from any other U46 school.
Earlier in the day, the tumbling team also had put on a show at Ontarioville Elementary School in Hanover Park, which had seen the biggest increase in its summer readership percentage last year. Bueche said the tumbling shows are designed to call attention to the beginning of this year’s Dr. Torres Summer Reading Challenge next month.
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The trick to Highland winning three years in a row? Johnson said the school staff has the competition down to a science.
First, each Highland family gets a phone call to remind children to keep reading over the summer.
“Then we have Highland Thursday. Every Thursday in June and July we have people at the library catching up with our families who are getting books to read.”
Finally, “success builds on success,” the principal said. “We expect students to read through the summer. We expect to win this contest.”
As the tumblers performed, the audience on one side of their landing mat included kids who had completed last summer’s reading challenge. But it was only about half as big as the crowd on the other side, made up of students who had not read enough books. Johnson hopes to eventually see every student on that first side.
After the show ended, the students mobbed several of the tumblers. One of those at the center of attention, 26-year-old Benjamin Robinson of Chicago, said he has been tumbling with the Jesse White organization since he was 14.
“I just graduated with my master’s degree in psychology,” he said, but he will continue tumbling as long as his body can take it.
Tumbler Steven Moore, a 23-year-old Chicagoan who attends Harold Washington College, said the group offers try-outs to kids from age 6 to 16. But “a lot of us are in our 20s now,” he said. He said more than 5,000 Chicago youths have joined the tumbling team since it was started by Jesse White, who is now Illinois’ secretary of state.
Collins said the sport can be dangerous. But the key to safety is “a lot of practice, hard work and drill,” said Collins, who has been doing that since he was 7 years old. He now works as a tumbling instructor..