Dancing Helps Kids Overcome 'Ick Factor'

McKinley Launches Program to Bring Back Arts in Elementary Curriculum

Instructor Dennis Schroeder watches over McKinley Elementary School dance students, including Jessica Kinney, left, and Caleb Kousa, in foreground. (By Dayna Smith -- The Washington Post)

Margot Hanclich cringed. It was just too gross. In front of her stood a classmate, arm outstretched, like some slimy, tentacled creature that had crept out of the sea.

This was the worst part of ballroom dancing. Touching boys.

But if Margot, 9, wanted to cha-cha-cha, she didn't have much choice. The teacher was already showing the steps: two long ones and three quick ones, "like stomping on cockroaches," he said. Shuddering, Margot let the boy take her hand. The stage of McKinley Elementary School's auditorium erupted in stomps.

Ballroom dancing is not offered in most elementary schools. But McKinley launched the eight-week course this fall in an initiative to get more arts into the curriculum at a time when many schools are cutting back. The program, which costs the school $2,270, brings professional dance instructors to the Arlington school Wednesday afternoons to introduce swing, salsa and waltzing to 32 squirmy, squeamish fourth- and fifth-graders.

At first, Assistant Principal Blake Tippens was unsure about the idea. "I told them, 'We're going to get all girls -- you know that, right? There's not a boy in this school that's going to sign up.' "

In fact, 27 students signed up. Five more on a waiting list were let in eventually. Even more surprising, more boys signed up than girls.

No one could quite explain this, although Principal Patricia Anderson had a theory: "The guys who chose to do it are the 'cool' guys, and that really made a difference. It was like, 'Well, if he's going to do it, I'm going to do it.' "

Some kids had a simpler explanation: "Because my mom forced me," said Joey Cimento, 10.

Several cited "Mad Hot Ballroom," a 2005 documentary about inner-city New York kids in a ballroom dancing competition. (A sign reading "Mad Hot McKinley" hung over the school stage.) Margot had seen part of the film. "They looked like adults, the way they danced," she said.

Dancing transformed the kids in the movie, said Sally Skislak, office manager of the Dance Factory in Arlington, which is providing the instructors. "They're gentlemen and ladies instead of boys and girls, or the bump and grind that you have in the hip-hop dancing. It's elegant; it's classy."

The lessons also reverberate off the dance floor, Skislak said. "You walk differently, you stand more erect, you exude confidence and other kids see that and pick that up."

That seems to be the thinking at McKinley, too. "They're learning things they can't learn in math, they can't learn in social studies," Tippens said. "They're learning this whole new respect for the partnership between boys and girls."