By Amanda Larch Hinchman
For HDMedia
During one snow day in January 2025, Fort Gay PK-8 Assistant Principal Shawn Ross decided to take inventory of all his jerseys.
Counting and organizing them by sport — with 96 football jerseys alone — Ross sent a picture to Fort Gay Principal Kelly Bonar and his sister Erin Fitzpatrick, who also works at the school. Bonar challenged him to wear one every day of the next school year, as Ross, a self-proclaimed obsessive collector, normally wore a different jersey each Friday anyway.
“I thought the idea was awesome,” Ross said. “The kids kind of picked up in the fall of 2024 that I had a lot of jerseys.”
From that January day until the beginning of the 2025-26 school year last August, Ross said he thought of ways to make this challenge impactful and came up with three overarching messages to go along with what school administrators had named the Jersey Journey. The first was about embracing who you are.
“That was the toughest part; I didn’t want to break dress code just for the sake of it,” he said. “As I introduced it in August, I told students, ‘It’s weird for a 42-year-old to have over 100 jerseys, I know that, but that’s cool, so just be you and own who you are.’”
Second, Ross wanted to introduce students to different colleges and higher learning opportunities, and he contacted several universities about his Jersey Journey. Mississippi State was the first to get back to him, with more following suit and sending souvenirs.
“A lot of students don’t know anything beyond Fort Gay,” Ross said. “I thought this could work, and sure enough, throughout the year colleges sent pennants and informational things we hung on the wall for the kids.”
Finally, Ross sought to make local connections and demonstrate what Fort Gay alums have gone on to accomplish. One former student he reached out to, Kyle Powers, is a trainer for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“I thought it’d be a great way to tie in some Wayne County kids who’ve done some great things with these professional organizations, so we were able to introduce them to folks like Kyle,” Ross said.
A teachable initiative
Ross created an educational element for the Jersey Journey as well, asking students a different trivia question each day, ranging in subjects from math and geography to social studies and literature. Students who gave correct answers could take photos with Ross to be posted on social media
“I wanted to make it connected to the jersey, so it lasted in their memory, and to make it cross-curricular,” Ross said. “I didn’t want to go with straight sports trivia, so I kind of ran the gamut of questions. A lot of them were geography and history-based, because that’s an easy tie-in with team localities.”
For example, Ross challenged students to calculate the perimeter of an ice hockey rink when he wore his Utah Mammoths jersey; he asked what the incubation period for turkey eggs was for Virginia Tech day; and when he featured the Arkansas Razorbacks in November, Ross asked students which city became the focal point for Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark school segregation case that originated in Topeka, Kansas.
The issue eventually played out with the first instance of integration of Black students in 1957 in a public school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The nine students who enrolled in Little Rock Central High School became known as The Little Rock Nine.
When no students could come up with the answer, Fort Gay social studies teacher Brooks Perry scrapped his plans for the day to teach about the court case and the Little Rock Nine.
“That’s how a lot of the middle school kids got the answer, so that was probably one of the cooler days of the Jersey Journey and my favorite social studies question,” Ross said.
‘I had jerseys to spare’
By the end of the school year, Ross had worn 176 different jerseys, having been absent for a few school days, and while some shared the same team, they were different numbers or players.
“I had jerseys to spare,” he said. “We did have repeats, because I’m a Reds and a Bengals fan, so we had multiple Reds and Bengals jerseys.”
On the last day of school, Ross delivered a message to students during an assembly that he believes is the most important of the Jersey Journey, he said.
“I said, ‘Your paths are going to take you all over the world. Some of you are going to leave and not come back. That’s fine. Those of you that do come back, make your home better, and if you stick around Fort Gay, do your best to improve it and take care of it,’” Ross said.
“I hope the kids remember years from now that if they take nothing else away from it, to chase their dream and take care of where they come from and remember their home,” he continued.
Ross even presented to the Wayne County Board of Education on June 9 about the experience.
“I told the board it started out as just a challenge to wear a different jersey, and by the time I delivered that final line of that message, it became everything,” Ross said.
What’s next for the Jersey Journey
Students have already asked Ross about repeating the Jersey Journey in years to come. Though it would take time to collect the number of new jerseys needed, he may already have enough hats for a variation of the challenge in the meantime, he said.
“I told them, as far as jerseys go, you’ve got to give me another five years — it took about five years to get the 170-plus jerseys — but I do own over 500 hats,” Ross said. “The challenge last time was making it impactful, and that took half a year to think about. So I’m going to stew on it, and we may do a sequel in a couple years.”
Having worked at Fort Gay PK-8 since it opened in 2013 and recently finishing his eighth year as vice principal at the school, Ross said he’s always felt the purpose of his educational career is to encourage students to adopt ethical qualities.
“Test scores are great, but I think the main goal is to produce kids who will be good human beings, and that’s what I wanted to do with this overarching message, to teach them it’s OK to be you, it’s OK to chase your dream,” he said.
A Wayne native, after spending time away, Ross now lives closer to his hometown and resides in Fallsburg, Kentucky.
“Fort Gay became my home, which is kind of why that final message all dealt with home, because sometimes home ain’t what you expected,” he said. “Because I thought I’d just be away my whole life, and then I ventured into Fort Gay, and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else now.”
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