KC-area teacher walked from Lee’s Summit to KCK to get winter coats for students
Early risers and insomniacs alike know an entirely different Kansas City.
At 4 a.m., distant commuters make their ways into town, likely grateful when their morning isn’t as cold as the one before — and dismayed when it is.
The streets are quiet, largely empty, in a city still waking up.
A few times a year, on mornings like this, Jeremy “JC” Van Deventer has been walking for hours. He doesn’t sleep much, but he’s constantly moving, his friends say.
Van Deventer, a teacher at Kansas City, Kansas’ Rosedale Middle School, spent a handful of December evenings and mornings walking to work from his home in Lee’s Summit. In weather that’s sometimes tempest and other times merciful, he sports nothing but a T-shirt, shorts and a backpack with safety supplies and snacks.
The walk is more than 16 miles. It takes him nearly six hours to complete it. Most of that time he spends alone, thinking.
He thinks about students in his school and across the metro who struggle to stay warm in the year’s coldest months. He thinks about how they often get to school without a warm jacket, or socks.
And he knows that he, and his friends, can do something to help.
Van Deventer just finished the second year of his annual sub-freezing walks fundraiser for local kids. His goal was to raise enough to buy warm clothes, hygiene products and more for at least 25 students on his campus and as many as possible elsewhere.
Here’s how it works: When donors meet a checkpoint, he walks. If they surpass the next goal, he walks.
“My body’s used to being abused,” he told The Star.
So far this winter, Van Deventer has walked from Lee’s Summit to Rosedale Middle School three times throughout the night. With that, he’s raised about $3,200 to get Rosedale students what they need and an additional $4,700 for children experiencing homelessness in Wyandotte County. He also sponsored a family that he raised $2,700 for.
He partnered with the Rosedale Development Association to raise funds for the middle school students and with Avenue of Life to support children in the broader county.
At least 762 Kansas City Kansas Public School students were homeless in the 2023-24 school year, according to state data. In that same year, Turner Unified School District had 90 homeless students, Piper Unified School District had 27 and Bonner Springs-Edwardsville USD had 19.
“If we raised a million dollars, we’d still have problems,” he said. “Ultimately what we’re trying to do is fill some gaps.”
How it began
An avid cyclist, Van Deventer often rides his bike into work, even when temperatures drop into the single digits.
During the early morning ride a few years back, he met people who didn’t have indoor shelter during the coldest months of the year. They slept on cardboard, or the sidewalk. Sometimes they were children.
“Resilience should never be a primary defining trait of a child,” he told The Star in late December.
So, he got some friends together and convinced them to help pitch in to buy coats last year. This year, he expanded the fundraiser to include other essential supplies, like warm socks and toiletries.
The walks are by no means easy on his body. Van Deventer leaves his home not long after midnight, walks through the evening and then teaches a full work day immediately after. He crosses through Independence, Raytown, Kansas City and KCK.
“The feet were only bloody this time because I forgot to wear Bombas socks,” he said of his first walk for this year, back in early December. But he’s learned to compartmentalize that pain. He said cold is only a state of mind prior to the state of injury.
Van Deventer recognizes that the 25 families at Rosedale Middle School that he sponsored this year are a fraction of the people across the Kansas City metro area who are experiencing homelessness.
“It’s about the other kids, and the other families,” Van Deventer said. He’s worked in education about 10 years, and with that comes meeting children with a variety of needs. He first wanted to work in social studies, because he felt that’s where he could help the most children learn to read, he said. Now, he works with students who might get into trouble at school and need some extra behavioral support.
‘Kids shouldn’t have to deal with that’
Barbara Noelle, a cycling buddy of Van Deventer, joined him for part of his first walk of the winter.
“There’s nothing like being out in the early, early morning like that, with no wind, and walking down a busy road,” Nolle said. She added that people still packed a beloved Independence dive bar when they strolled by.
Nolle and Van Deventer have known each other for five or six years, she said. From early on in their friendship, she said it was clear Van Deventer was interested in helping people however he could.
“If he saw a need, he was really interested in helping that, whatever it was,” Noelle said, listing off past efforts of his, like educating people on bicycle and pedestrian safety and helping out kids who are readying to age out of foster care.
She hopes local events that raise awareness for children in need of extra support get stronger recognition and community participation. Why not everyone walk a little bit of that 16-plus-mile walk instead of one person having to do the whole thing?
“But what if MORE could be done by more community involvement?” she wrote in a text last week.
Steve White, another friend of Van Deventer’s, was among four friends who joined him for his second walk of the winter on Dec. 18. He said he came out to show support and raise funds for the thousands of children who live below the poverty line in the Kansas City area.
“We want to do what we can to help them out because kids shouldn’t have to deal with that, no one should, but especially kids,” White said. “So, we’re just hoping we can make a difference.”
