A Peek at the Canvas: March
by Frank Caracciolo
The most recent episode of The Blank Canvas with Frank Caracciolo is out now. Released on May 7th, the episode features a conversation with teachers Brittanie Romito and Alexandra Pileggi of Maple Grove, whose students won the First Elementary School Dance Off!
Frank Caracciolo: Can you introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell us what you do at our school board?
Brittanie Romito: Yes. So my name is Brittany Romito. I’m a teacher here for Lester B. Pearson School Board. And I currently teach Grade 6 at Maple Grove.
Alexandra Pileggi: And my name is Ally Pileggi. I’m also a teacher at Lester B. Pearson School Board at Maple Grove and I teach Grade 5.
Frank Caracciolo: So we joined us ourselves together. I ended up getting to judge. I was asked by our “fearless leader,” Scott Taylor, who is the physical education consultant for the school board. And Scott asked me to come and judge and I thought it was going to be a small little event and I couldn’t believe how many people showed up and how fierce it was and it was really, really something special and I was so enthusiastic about it I’ve been talking about it all around the school board. Can you tell… ‘cause you’re both general practitioners in teaching? How did you get into the dance world?
Alexandra Pileggi: So both Brittany and I have had a massive dance background in our lives. We have both been in the dance world since a young age. I have been dancing at the same studio since the age of four. I’ve been teaching there for 12 years. I was also part of the Montreal Alouettes cheerleading team for eight seasons and served as captain for two, so dance has been a huge part of my life and Brittany’s as well. She has a dance background…
Brittanie Romito: Yeah, I’ve danced my whole life. I’ve done different competitions, I’ve also done cheerleading for over 10 years, so it’s something that we were very passionate about. So when we heard of the opportunity, we jumped on it immediately.
Frank Caracciolo: So how? How does it come to you? The dance off? Because I know there’s a dance committee, and I know…. I mean, I spoke with Scott about about the whole project. but to you, how did it come to you and how did you develop it? Because, I mean, we’ll talk about the results in a bit, but, I mean, how did that all start?
Alexandra Pileggi: We were approached by one of our gym teachers, Will Davidson, who was part of our team. He was like our team manager almost and he brought it to our attention and kind of just said, hey, look, they want to do this this year, it’s new. Would you guys be in, would you want to take care of this for us because he knew that both of us had a background in dance, and we just jumped on the opportunity. We were very excited about it.
Brittanie Romito: We wanted to bring the arts into our school as much as possible, and this was the perfect opportunity to allow our kids to learn how to work in a team, how to be on a team, how to be in a dance class. A lot of them don’t get the opportunity for that kind of stuff… So…
Alexandra Pileggi: Giving them that exposure was really important to us, yeah.
