Students Rally for Children With Cancer

On Wednesday, Kids at a school in Fort Worth rallied in support of other children who battle cancer every day.

"We have a lot of important people coming, (former TCU and pro football player) LaDainian Tomlinson, (TCU mascot) Superfrog, the Texas Rangers mascot," said fourth grader Bella Flores.

The 9-year-old student is leading the pep rally at International Leadership School Keller and the fight against childhood cancer. 

"I don't want them to suffer through cancer," said Bella. "We are going gold for them."

Bella picked the national "Go Gold" campaign as her service learning project. Her classmates in the fourth grade liked it, and the 1,500  students at ITL Keller then voted to take it school-wide.  

"She was very passionate about it," said Leopoldo Perea, Bella's fourth grade teacher.

The pep rally was just a small part of Bella's plan. Her goal was to get pro football players and baseball players to wear gold, too.     

"Isabella Flores came up with the idea of writing letters to NFL and MLB to try to get them to wear something gold during the month of September,' said the teacher.

Bella and 155 other fourth graders went on a letter-writing campaign.

"I told them I'm a fourth grader at this school, and we do a service learning project every year. And I put some reasons why we should go gold in September, because we know children, and we want to do something special for them." she said. 

The first responses came last weekend. 

"Of course, Saturday I started getting emails and text messages from parents getting all these post cards, and it was absolutely exciting," said Perrea.

"And I looked at the bottom of it and it said from the commissioner of baseball, and I started freaking out," said Bella.

All the students who wrote letters to MLB Commissioner Robert Manfred, Jr. got a postcard saying "Major League Baseball is committed to supporting awareness, research and early detection of different types of cancer including childhood cancers. This September MLB players will wear gold ribbon decals on their uniforms to raise awareness of this important cause."

John Blake, Executive Vice President of Communications at the Texas Rangers, told NBCDFW: "Yes, we are hosting our annual Childhood Cancer Awareness Night / Pediatric cancer Awareness Night on September 2. We had planned it before this school sent in letters as had MLB….that being said, we did receive all of those letters and we are sending an alumni and mascot to their school."

MLB supported the #GoGold campaign in September 2015, too, with clubs taking part in their own way. 

"We think it’s great what the kids are doing," wrote Rich Dalrymple, Senior Vice President of Public Relations and Communications with the Dallas Cowboys in an email to NBC 5. "Our support of childhood cancer extends throughout the entire calendar year, and includes participation with organizations such as the Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, the Children’s Cancer Fund and the Make-A-Wish Foundation."

For Bella, it's confirmation of a huge lesson ITL teaches its students about living a life that puts others before self

"It makes me feel happy, like I'm changing the world," she said. 

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