Author: Hans Fequiere

Ketanji Brown Jackson is on President Joe Biden’s narrowed list of his first U.S. Supreme Court pick. That’s because a current justice, Stephen Breyer, has announced his retirement. Ms. Brown Jackson, 51, is from south Florida. She is a 1988 graduate of Miami Palmetto Senior High School, then attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and for law school. She was nominated by then-President Barack Obama to be a federal trial court judge, while President Biden elevated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2021. “She was a star in the making,” said Nathaniel Persily, Ms. Jackson’s former classmate at Palmetto and now a law professor at Stanford University in California. “The only question was is she going to be on the Supreme Court or is she going to be president of the United States?” Read a national news story about her and her potential nomination here.

That is what the founder of Soul Movement, a West Palm Beach-based dance program, says all the time: give them dance. In fact, Samantha Cyprian (pictured) left her well-paying job as a school psychologist in Orlando two years ago to return home to teach dance. She spent a year at her alma mater, Dreyfoos School of the Arts, but decided she wanted to, well, give them dance.

“It was important to me that kids who looked like me, who loved dance like me, get a chance to do just that,” she said. “I wanted to do what I could to get more of them in the pipeline.”

So when she learned of an opening for a dance instructor at U.B. Kinsey/Palmview Elementary School of the Arts, she jumped at the chance. She joined the dance teacher already there, Tina Martin, and, in her first year, 12 of the 13 students who tried out for Bak Middle School of the Arts got in. That’s huge.

Meanwhile, she launched Soul Movement last year, which offers dance classes that focus on the fundamental skills of technical dance forms, yes, but it also focuses on life skills. She’s a psychologist, remember? “We want to help as much as we can to ensure a well-rounded child,” she said, “which creates a successful child.”

The dance company offers classes in Creative Movement and Pre-Ballet/Ballet/Modern for students ages 3 to 7. Classes are held from 9 to 10 a.m. Saturdays at Florida Dance Conservatory in West Palm Beach. And the first class is free! For more information, contact Ms. Cyprian at 225-268-0991 or soulmovement.artistry@gmail.com. Learn more and register for classes here. In other words, take the first step to give them dance.