Have you heard the news?
The community is abuzz with something explosive (think Katy Perry’s “Fireworks”) and POSITIVE coming out of the Brockport Central School District – the Hill School’s entry into The Pink Glove Dance: The Competition.
What is The Pink Glove Dance?
It is a way to raise awareness of breast cancer through community building, creativity, and dance. The phenomenon was started two years ago when employees at Medline donned pink gloves and made a music video. The video ended up on YouTube where it has been viewed 13 million times!
Recently Medline decided to host an online nationwide competition to find the next best Pink Glove Dance video. Hospitals, nursing homes, schools and anyone in the U.S. and Canada who wanted to organize a group of people were asked to produce and submit their own video.
The top three winners of the contest will receive donations in their name to a breast cancer charity of their choice, such as the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
Four fifth grade teachers at the Hill School in Brockport – Karen Bourg, Karen Carges, Kelly Kinslow, and David Resseguie heard about the contest and decided to rally their students to enter.
Their primary goal was not to win the competition (though that would be extraordinary and I am asking all of my readers to help them do so by clicking here!!!!)
Their goal, according to a press release from Bourg, Carges, Kinslow, and Resseguie, was to “illuminate the need for education and research to destroy all cancers”
The teachers found the creation and making of the video to be a powerful experience. According to Bourg, Carges, Kinslow, and Resseguie:
The effect of preparations and making the video has been profound. The conversations held in the classrooms made us all realize that cancer has an impact on all of us. Not only was cancer awareness and education established, but the classrooms have a better sense of a community, therefore making an enriched learning environment.
The video was filmed by students at Brockport High School. BHS, you may remember, lost their assistant vice principal Tobias Ekeze to cancer over the summer.
The district has been hit hard by cancer in the past year. In July 2010 Juliana LaMonica (JJ) – the sister of a student at the Ginther School – died of childhood leukemia at age three.
During JJ’s battle with cancer, many of the students that participated in the Pink Glove Dance participated in PJAMMIN Day for JJ – a district wide event to raise awareness of cancer.
I was excited to learn about the Hill School’s entry and applaud the four teachers that organized it for thinking outside the box and embracing the sad fact that almost all children know someone that has or had cancer.
I believe the creation of the video empowers our children so that they feel they have a way to stand up to cancer. Who knows, maybe one of the children in the video will discover a cure for a type of cancer twenty years from now…in pink gloves of course.