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Mostly Cloudy Program teaches girls to redefine beauty
Five fifth-grade girls at the William L. Buck School watched attentively as a model on the screen in front of them was transformed by clicks of a mouse, her physical features adjusted until the faceless person working the mouse was satisfied.
When the video clip was over, social worker Jo-Anne Casucci asked the girls about what they saw. They responded that the woman’s reworked appearance was Photoshopped, noting many of the features that were changed.
Casucci shifted the conversation to parts of the girls’ bodies that they consider beautiful. She gave her own: “At first I thought my hair,” Casucci said, “but then I thought my arms, because that’s what I hold my children with, and I can protect my children.”
The students listed theirs: legs that make them tall, arms that they hug people with and hands for high fives and holding things. They then created paper cutouts of their hands that they decorated, which Casucci said they could add to and hang at home.
The activities are part of the Beautiful Me curriculum, a program started by the Hance Family Foundation in memory of three girls from Floral Park who died in an infamous crash on the Taconic Parkway in 2009. The program provides lesson plans “designed to teach females of all ages how to think positively and with assurance about their bodies, their skills and their relationships with others,” according to the foundation’s website.
Casucci said she is involved with the foundation and wanted the program to be a regular feature in District 24. “The video alone is shocking,” she said.
