Leslie Lee

As Leslie Lee describes it, something changes inside of students when they begin to dance. Or, the change may actually occur before they take those first steps.

“When they enter my classroom, they’re magically transformed, and they have to adhere to it,” said Lee, owner of Elegance Ballroom Dance and Fitness Studio. I tell them, ‘Those are magic doors. They came with me. And when you walk through the doors, you’re automatically a lady and a gentleman.’”

Lee’s service was among the items approved by the Meridian Public School District school board during its December meeting this past Monday. Lee will be teaching two classes in ballroom dance to each of the four Poplar Springs Elementary School fourth-grade classes in February, before Valentine’s Day — an important marker since she’ll be helping them to prepare for a Valentine’s Day dance at the school. Funding for the classes comes from the Poplar Springs Elementary Arts Initiative.

The dancing lessons may plant the seeds for skills that the students can build on later in life, but the whole act of dancing, as Lee noted, may also have broader, and more immediate, effects.

“With fourth-graders, developmentally and socially they’re at that age where they really need this,” she said. “It’s very important to them.”

But she also sees the need to proceed with caution, at least for a little while.

“I kind of trick them into dancing with each other,” she said. “We start off with some simple movement, exercises, different activities where they’re not really touching anyone.”

Before long, though, she and Stephen Thomas, an instructor at Elegance Ballroom Dance and Fitness Studio, have the students dancing with partners.

“We come armed with hand sanitizer to give them their ‘cootie shot,’” Lee said with a laugh.

She said Thomas’ instruction is helpful in a number of ways, including as a kind of example for the children.

“It’s good for the children, for the boys especially, to see a man dancing,” Lee said.

Lee said she’s been teaching in schools throughout the state for 10 years, from preschool to college level. She’s taught at Poplar Springs Elementary School, as well as other area schools, during that period.

The lessons, she said, go beyond dance.

“Yes we’re getting them to learn how to dance, but that’s the vehicle for the social etiquette part,” she said.

History, Lee said, is also a key part of the lessons, as students learn the merengue, waltz, rumba, swing and possibly some salsa along with the cultural influences that cultivated those dances. She might invoke a dance studio in Harlem where some of the experimentation fusing various dance styles occurred.

And it’s the moment-to-moment interaction among the students that Lee particularly emphasized.

“It’s really just a game of teamwork,” she said. “If they take a step forward, their partner has to take a step back. So it’s that movement-based teamwork.”

She also stresses a kind of egalitarian spirit that leaves no student outside of the dance circle.

“I don’t let them say ‘ooh,’ or ‘no,’ or ‘I can’t,’” she said. “Those are words that are unacceptable in my classroom. Everybody is an equal. Everybody is the same in my class, and everyone in my class is a lady and/or a gentleman. They’re no longer fourth-graders. There are no kids. I respect them, and they respect each other.”

Clair Huff, lead teacher and arts project director, noted the various sides of dance that come to the surface when Lee teaches.

“We do this during PE (physical education), and dance is movement,” Huff said. She also noted Lee’s use of history and her emphasis on social etiquette — or perhaps something deeper than etiquette.

“She teaches them to respect one another,” Huff said.

And the dancing, Lee said, often seeps outside of the school day for students.

“Most of them are able to go home and dance with their grandma or their mom or dad and they’ll come back and they’re excited because their mom knew what they were doing or their grandma knew what they were doing,” she said. “And some of them will teach their parents in their kitchen at night. I love that it gets that conversation started at home.”