Gold Award Girl Scout inspires students through music

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One of Oceanside’s own rising stars has been awarded the highest honor a Girl Scout can receive: the Gold Award. Recent Oceanside High School graduate and Girl Scout, Sarah Romanelli is making headlines again for her continued work on Music Inspires! a program she developed more than a year ago as part of her Silver Award project.

Romanelli became involved in theatre when she was 10, and estimates that she’s been in upwards of 30 performances since. She said that performing teaches things you can’t learn elsewhere. “It showed me how to have work ethic, how to be passionate, how to work with others and be creative,” she said. “You don’t get that in a classroom.” With Music Inspires! she sought to share that experience with others.

Music Inspires! is meant to promote inclusiveness, and to help students be more self-confident. The program first debuted in July, 2016, and culminated in a series of musical revue performances at the Oceanside Library, high school and Ronald McDonald House. Romanelli estimates that she has spent over a hundred hours on the project, and as part of it worked with 22 kids and teenagers, between the ages 9 and 20, helping them develop their theatrical abilities through it.

“Only five percent of eligible Girl Scouts successfully earn, the Gold Award,” according to Donna Ceravolo, executive director and CEO of the Girl Scouts of Nassau county, “making these girls part of an exclusive group of women with the tools to become leaders in the 21st century.”

Romanelli has used these tools in a number of ways, including as president of the Oceanside High School Thespian Troupe 132, and in her work researching chemotherapy-resistant strains of leukemia, which got her into the national Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology semifinals. “I have my science life, and I have my stage life,” she said. “The two are very different.”

Different, although perhaps not completely separate; Romanelli told the Herald last October that her cancer research, was originally inspired by a friend in her theatre company who suddenly contracted leukemia, and could no longer participate in the group’s activities.

She says she is aiming to be a pediatric oncologist, and will be pursuing that goal at Emory University in the fall, where she will minor in musical theatre.