Dance teacher Persephone DaCosta started a girls’ empowerment club at her New York City public school that was so successful it was transformed into an academic class. The enterprise has earned her a coveted FLAG Foundation Award. Photo Credit: PATCH
I always enjoy sharing stories about creative educators who have earned accolades for their work with students. One of these is Persephone DaCosta, a dance teacher from New York who has earned a coveted FLAG Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence.
Persephone teaches traditional, West African, and Africa-Caribbean dance at Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public school located in Boerum Hill in Brooklyn, New York. The school offers a multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction. There she inaugurated a young women’s empowerment circle she called ROSE, an acronym for Respectful Outstanding Sisters of Excellence. As part of the program, high school students gathered after school to talk about sisterhood and leadership. Before long, Persephone noticed the positive impact of the program on her students. Their attendance improved, they were getting better grades, and they were behaving better. Inspired by the students’ progress, Persephone transformed ROSE into an academic class that focuses on leadership and mentorship. In this course, students plan school-wide events, visit college campuses, and learn about mental wellness.
Of Trinidadian descent, Persephone began her dance training at the age of 6. She has studied ballet, tap, jazz, and traditional African dance. She graduated from Stony Brook University, where she studied dance, anthropology, and “Community Development through the Arts.”
The FLAG Award “is meant to identify teachers, recognize them for the incredible things they are doing in and out of the classroom, and award them for all of their efforts,” explains FLAG co-president Risa Daniels. “These are teachers who are having an impact beyond the classroom and doing things that are having long lasting, ripple effects on their schools,” she continued. As a winner of the FLAG award, Persephone will receive $25,000 and Khalil Gibran International Academy will receive a $10,000 grant to spend on their arts education program. Persephone intends to use the grant to renovate her sparsely-equipped dance studio.
