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This year, Palmetto Senior High incoming senior Savannah Cain worked on earning her Girl Scout Gold Award.
The Gold Award project has allowed her to combine her love for dance, volunteering and scouting. Cain has volunteered for Achieve Miami and she’s been a member of the Variations Dance Team at Palmetto and she dances with a competitive dance studio.
The Achieve Miami program sends Palmetto’s volunteers to Caribbean Elementary every other Saturday to help the elementary school children improve their literacy by working with them on reading and writing.
Inspired by the idea that she could help the children gain even more confidence in their reading, she began to plan a program where she would provide the children with dance costumes, teach them dances and help them put on a skit.
“Since I love volunteering with the little kids so much and I also love to dance,” she says.
She began collecting dance costumes from her school and her dance studio for the show.
“I didn’t collect much from Palmetto because we left school so early,” she says.
Unfortunately, she keeps having to adjust her plans because of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Initially she had planned to put on the event at the Achieve Miami summer camp, then she was going to teach the kids via Zoom at the summer camp, then she was going to wait until the beginning of the school year. Cain has been working with the Achieve Miami director to find the best time and the best way to do the project.
Cain started dancing in 2005, when she was two years old. She currently dances at Dance Empire of Miami. She’s a competitive dancer and co-captain of the senior company at her studio. At competitions she participates in group dances but she also does solos. Her dance studio often wins and she does well in her solo dances. Last fall, the studio received first place in most of the dances and she was in the top three in her category.
They were supposed to go to the national competitions but again the coronavirus caused the competition to be cancelled.
She’s also in Variations at Palmetto.
“We competed last year in January but since it was the first time, we didn’t place,” she says. “We were going to compete again but we couldn’t because of COVID.”
She’s a member of the Palmetto Key Club, the Jewish Student Union, the Forensic Investigative Academy, the National Honor Society, the National Honor Society for Dance Art, and Class of 2021 cabinet. She will be the parliamentarian for Student Council Senate for this upcoming year.
This spring, Cain received the PAW Award, given to Palmetto students for being a leader, being involved in extracurricular activities and being a strong community volunteer.
Although summer is usually seen as a time of rest and relaxation, Cain is not taking the summer off from academics. She’s taken two Florida Virtual School courses, PE and Spanish III while also taking statistic as a dual enrollment course at Miami-Dade.
She’s also been taking online classes with her studio over Zoom. She planned to go back to the studio of summer intensives.
In other summers, Cain volunteered as an assistant at her studio’s summer camp. She taught the younger kids how to dance and helped with the arts and crafts sessions. Whenever possible, she takes dance intensives for herself in the summer.
Cain plans to apply to schools like the University of California at Santa Barbara, Georgetown, FSU and Tulane. While still undecided, she believes she’ll pursue a pre-med track.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
