|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Miami Palmetto High senior Peyton Mandelbaum has more than a thousand community service hours. Many of those hours are tied to dance. Every summer she has volunteered at a dance camp at her dance studio, Dance Empire of Miami, where she is on the competition team called the Elite Company.
In April, she was going to host an event called Dance for Crohn’s and Colitis to raise money and awareness about the condition. The plan called for having a dance performance from every Miami dance studio. Those who participated would pay a donation fee.
Because of the coronavirus, the event went virtual, and was being edited at the beginning of August. It should be available at the end of the month.
The issue is important to her because her mom suffered from Crohn’s. When Mandelbaum was in fifth grade, things got worse and her mom started needing surgery.
“She was in the hospital for around eight months,” Mandelbaum says. “What I had was dance to help me to get through it. It was always there for me. Why not give back in a way that’s always been there for me?”
Her mom is doing well now but Mandelbaum wanted to help others. She’d been kicking around the fundraiser idea for a couple of years. She saw how it could work when her dance teacher put together a recital where the dancers sent in videos of dances they had performed during the year.
At school, Mandelbaum is one of the captains of Variations, the Palmetto dance team. The team went to one competition this year where they earned third place for one of their dances.
“For the first time competing, that’s good,” she says. “It’s good to see what’s out there.”
She’s attended an American Dance Alliance camp at Barry University both as an officer and a member of the team.
“You wake up at six, you start dancing at eight and dance until eight,” she says. “On the last day the parents come.”
For two years she’s been an ADA ambassador and she has earned three medals at the ADA camps.
“I got one my first summer and then one at officer camp, one at the team camp,” she says.
She had been excited to go back and get another medal this summer but that was not possible because of COVID-19.
She’s learned to enjoy dancing at home and has learned to enjoy putting together dance videos and putting them on social media.
Outside of dance, Mandelbaum is a member of the Social Science Honor Society and participates in History Bowl.
“I never knew I liked history until I took Advanced Placement World History,” she says.
Her AP teacher encouraged her to join history bowl for sophomore year.
Mandelbaum is also a member of the English Honor Society, the National Honor Society and Student Council.
“This year I’m on the board as one of the Chiefs of the Senate,” she says. “Our job is pretty cool. At Palmetto the SC is really big. This is a new position. We get to pick the senators and help place the people applying for senate will go. Once the senate is decided, we get to oversee all of their meetings.”
Last school year she was the Special Events Chair. She was also historian in the new Finance Club.
For college, she’d love to go to a West Coast university, possibly USC. She’s considering history or political science for a major, and a minor in dance.
Mandelbaum is interested in becoming a lawyer and then becoming a politician.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
