School shining with star power

The kids at Olympus Junior High School have a few cool things you might be interested in.

How about an autographed Dave Matthews CD? A framed picture signed by Wayne Gretzky. A football signed by the Indianapolis Colts? A basketball signed by the Utah Jazz? Autographed posters of Kelly Ripa, Matthew McConaughey, Paul Newman, Martina McBride, Brooks and Dunn, John Travolta, Elijah Wood,

Denzel Washington, James Caan, Lindsay Davenport and every one of the Desperate Housewives? A Kenny Wallace NASCAR T-shirt? A Marie Osmond doll? A Steve Young-signed football?

How about another 75 or so more items in addition to all of the above?

The truth is, the kids at Olympus Junior High may be the best-connected students on the planet. They've got more ins to celebrities than Oprah.

And the reason is the celebrity who sweeps their halls, Terry Birch.

Birch has a few adversities he's trying to deal with. He can't hear and desperately needs a cochlear implant. His wife is receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer, and they are in tremendous debt. And the house they live in with their four children has a mold problem that needs immediate attention.

The good-natured janitor didn't get on the intercom one morning and announce this, but over time the information got out, the way it does in a community, eventually reaching Mira Leffler, a seventh-grade history teacher who runs "Project Citizen."

Last fall, Mrs. Leffler rallied the seventh-graders in her six classes to organize a service project for Terry.

Then, when the rest of the school found out what was going on, everybody wanted to get involved.

The result is "Help Terry," an eBay auction of celebrity memorabilia that began its online run last Tuesday and runs through this Friday and is the manifestation of what happens when an entire school jumps on the bandwagon.

Every kid at Olympus Junior — and there are about 840 of them — wrote at least one letter to at least one celebrity to collect the stuff for the auction. Some wrote 30. Teachers, too, got involved. Rob Brough, the PE coach, wrote 30 letters himself. He's the one who got the NASCAR shirt.