SEBASTIAN — True art changes the world. This is the story of one girl who is working to do just that, using visual aesthetics as her medium.
Gabby Ioffredo watched with happy anticipation as, one by one, her Sebastian Elementary School classmates received an invitation to what was sure to be the birthday party of the year.
The boys groaned at first, but soon traded arm punches over the time they would have together, despite the fact it was a “girly party.”
Young ladies chatted and giggled with excitement, until, finally, the chatting and giggling faded.
“Where’s my invitation?” asked Gabby, sincerely puzzled but unconcerned.
“You can’t do this activity, so you can’t come,” came the reply.
Eleven-year-old Gabby still remembers that day, the day her world stood still.
“It made me feel like I don’t belong,” Gabby said. “Like I was invisible. Like no one understands me.”
The trip back to her desk seemed the longest in her life. Surely everyone was watching her wobbly gait, steadied somewhat by the braces on her legs.
She tried to pretend it didn’t just happen, but the hot tears that streamed down her cheeks gave her away.
For the rest of the school year, Gabby withdrew behind walls that would protect her from being hurt again.
“Kids are mean to begin with, but if you have an obvious difference in a way that is perceived to be negative, they can be downright cruel. From the waist down, my daughter is handicapped. But from the waist up, she’s all girl, obsessed with One Direction and Justin Bieber and eager to chat about it with others,” Tinamarie Ioffredo said.
She turned a negative into a positive for her daughter and launched a nonprofit dance team called Sebastian Has Hip Hop Come Hip Hop with Us.
Gabby would have a permanent dance party with her peers who are challenged, alongside youth without challenges invited to take part, all at no charge.
Ioffredo is hoping to increase the number of youngsters who take part in the urban art form beyond the 35 to 55 who already show up each week.
The class is held Wednesdays at the Sebastian Boys and Girls Clubs on Friendship Drive.
Coincidentally, the street name is the precise mission of her nonprofit: to recruit welcoming peers for her daughter.
The group meets from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. during the summer, an hour later when school is in session.
What happened to the Ioffredos could happen to anyone.
The couple looked forward to the birth of their daughter. They inventoried the growing stash of pink and lace items given by family and friends that would be Gabby’s badge of sugar and spice.
But something went wrong.
At six months along, Ioffredo had an alarming show of blood, indicating the placenta was torn.
Gabby would have to come into the world three months early, via a dangerous birth that robbed her brain of oxygen to the extent she was left with cerebral palsy.
The accompanying epilepsy plagues her with short- and long-term memory loss to this day.
Her bright intellect is trapped inside a body she cannot control. Her arms wave with excitement when she is happy or agitated.
Squeals of delight or groans of dissatisfaction may come out louder than she would like, attracting the kind of attention a tween does not crave.
“People who don’t know me treat me as if I am mentally retarded and incapable of hearing them or understanding what they are saying. They stare as though I can’t see them and they talk about me as if I am not there,” Gabby said.
She contemplates her rise to Sebastian Middle School in the fall, an age when, she has been warned, the mean streak of youth grows even deeper.
“I can assure you, I am in here, and I do hear you,” she said.
On the dance floor, she is free.
“I can lose myself in the music and the spirit of the team. No one is looking at me. No one is judging me. I am just me,” Gabby said, her arms and head telegraphing her delight with the passion of a maestro, conducting the music of her life.
Performing in public, Gabby finally gets the kind of attention all tweens do crave.
Sebastian Hip Hop performs at venues all over the greater Indian River County area, such as Sebastian River High School, Vero Beach High School, the local Fourth of July festivities, the annual Frog Leg Festival and the firefighters’ hometown community picnic.
Ioffredo’s mission is a sneaky one.
On the surface, she is giving the adolescent performers a chance to show their stuff, a chance to make all their hard work pay off, a chance to get positive reinforcement from family and friends in particular, and the world in general.
In actuality, she is working to change the way the world sees children with disabilities and to get their peers with traditional abilities to be nicer to them.
She also has some other ideas on how to make that happen.
“At her school, they make all the students with disabilities sit at one table together, rather than incorporating them around the cafeteria with others,” Ioffredo said. “Well, you know, some of the students hear and see things they don’t understand, and it causes some to make fun of them. I want there to be more blending in with others. That is the only way they will learn about their peers who have such differences and learn to embrace them. We all become better human beings.”
Ioffredo will have a like-minded partner when Gabby gets to Sebastian River High School. Karen Nystrom, special education teacher for what will be Gabby’s class, agrees.
“There is too much separation,” said Nystrom, whose son has Asperger’s syndrome, a nontraditional neural state of the brain on the spectrum of autism.
“We raise them in two different worlds, but when they become adults, there is only one world, and to an extent there is separation, there is a reduced ability of both groups to understand each other,” Nystrom said.
Both Ioffredo and Nystrom are quick to state that the Indian River School District does a fine job with the resources it has and that it is committed to the education and future of students with disabilities.
It’s just that, as consumers of the services, they have a different idea on how services those should be delivered.
It is not the first time Ioffredo has used the art of dance to connect with students with disabilities, and to connect them with their traditionally developing peers.
She has been a volunteer coach for the Barber Street Sharks community sports league, which opens cheerleading to students of all abilities.
She moved to hip hop as a more contemporary art medium to reach a wider slice of life.
As with the Sharks, Ioffredo’s position is an unpaid one.
“I get paid in hugs and smiles. That means more to me than all the money in the world.”
For more information on Sebastian Hip Hop, call (772) 646-1994.