Recently, a KIRO 7 Seattle news reporter was reporting on our cheer team at Bothell. They reported about how the BHS cheer team was told they weren’t allowed to go out of state for competitions. This was told to them by a source unknown to us. When KIRO 7 Seattle News came to interview Bothell; KIRO 7 and the cheer team were told that their cheer team could only “go every-other-year travel ban for out-of-state competition.” They soon found out that the ban was meant to save money.  I interviewed cheerleader Ella Gibbs (26) about her reaction to hearing about the travel ban. She kindly responded by saying, “It was kinda disappointing because that meant that I couldn’t go every single year that I wanted to go and every year that we could qualify, and it also why are we just now finding out about this for the season and were not guaranteed to qualify every year so that means we couldn’t go even if we had the opportunity to go every other year.” 

The second question I asked her was about her reaction to Principal Price’s school-wide email addressing the travel ban. She replied, “I was just a little confused at first, and I understood what the miscommunication was and I understood that, that needed to be addressed for no confusion to happen.”  The email told us what was miscommunicated with our cheer team. It states that our out-of-state travel policy was recently updated in August and that our cheer team is able to travel out of state for cheer competitions. This caused quite a bit of confusion focused on the cheer team on whether they’re allowed to travel out of state for competitions or not. 

In the end, Principle Price confirmed that they are allowed to travel out of state for cheer competitions if they fund the travel without school funds.