JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A longtime tradition in Jacksonville is happening in Jacksonville Sunday night.
The 43rd Miss Delta Teen Pageant is not your typical pageant.
It is a way to give mentorship to teenagers to help them thrive beyond the pageant stage.
The pageant is Sunday night at 6 p.m. at the Florida Theatre downtown.
Nine young ladies are the newest group a part of a longtime tradition.
They are competing in this year’s Miss Delta Teen Pageant. It goes beyond a traditional pageant. It is the culmination of a 10-week development program.
The contestants spent three to four days a week over that time working on things, including communication and life skills, which they can take with them in the future.
Dalayah Hartley and Ayanni Stanley-Cunningham are both competing.
Hartley just finished her junior year at Raines High School while Stanley-Cunningham graduated from Jean Ribault High School, and is off to Florida State University in the fall. She will be studying behavioral neuroscience.
“I wanted to step out of my comfort zone,” Hartley said. “I was a very shy intimate girl. I wanted to kind of step out of my box and join something that I never thought I would do.”
“I wanted to come back to a sisterhood and to a group of mentors that really inspired me to be my best self,” Stanley-Cunningham said. “I was not the most outgoing person when I first started this experience, but since then I have gained so much confidence. I truly do love my pageant sisters that have gained along the way.”
Michele Bell-Badger and Ingrid Bethel are the pageant’s co-directors and co-chairs.
It is the 43rd edition of the Miss Delta Teen Pageant, which dates back to the 1970s. This year’s theme is “The Golden Opportunity.”
The program is put on by the historic sorority, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.
“They all need some type of mentor,” Bell-Badger said of the girls competing. “This opportunity provides them with a way to be in touch with other young women that are in a variety of different fields that they may not even think about even looking at.”
“We enjoy working with them, Bethel said. ”But one of the ways we do that it is through initiatives like this that allow us to have day-to-day contact and become mentors not only during the pageant, but beyond."
Gabrielle Gibson and Jaslyn Dickerson are also competing.
Gibson is going into her senior year at Bishop Kenny High School.
Dickerson just graduated from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and is heading to UNF to study political science.
“This pageant has really developed me as a young woman,” Gibson said. “I have experience to go out into the real world.”
“I got to know these ladies and the sisterhood that I have developed and just the qualities of Delta,” Dickerson said. “The things that they value, specifically how much they pour back into the community, specifically for veterans. My family is full of veterans. That is something very close to my heart and the act of service. I want to be of help to my community that has poured so much into me.”
There are going to be four categories they will compete in which includes an interview, talent, evening gown, and on-stage question and answer.
The newest Miss Delta Teen will be crowned, there will be three runners up, a Miss Congeniality and Miss Dedication.
Bell-Badger said she gained a lot of respect from this group as it addressed hot topics her generation is facing.
“The effects of social media, things that are happening and occurring on their campuses,” Bell-Badger said of some of those issues the girls talked about during a roundtable discussion. “They are faced often with dealing with gun violence, and the effects of those types of things, especially mental and health issues. They taught us a lot about what this generation is facing. Then they gave us an idea of how we can take some of those topics that they brought up to implement in some of our program planning, such as the Dr. Betty Shabazz’ DELTA GEMS and the EMBODY program.”
People can buy tickets at dstjax.org, which is where they can also donate to the program.
