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MANITOWOC - In just a few days, Courtney Pelot will hop on a plane to Atlantic City with the hopes of winning the national Miss America pageant.
As the winner of the 2016 Miss Wisconsin pageant in June, Pelot will go on to compete in this year’s Miss America pageant in September, along with 49 other representatives from each state. The Miss America Organization, a non-profit organization that promotes women's education, holds annual pageants to award scholarships to women from all over the United States.
The national pageant will be in Atlantic City, where Pelot, along with the other contestants, will engage in various activities, such as dinners, a parade and even a charity walk, before the pageant starts Sept. 6.
“It will be a long two weeks, but I’m very excited,” Pelot said.
As a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in communication arts, and a resident of Manitowoc, Pelot said she has grown up wanting to participate in pageants. The tipping point came when she realized she needed even more money to pay off her student loans. The prize for winning at various levels of the Miss America pageants is scholarship money.
“In my freshman year of college, I knew that most of my scholarships had come from Lincoln High School,” Pelot said. “There were a lot of really awesome scholarships that I had gotten from them, but they were mostly one-year scholarships. So, I didn’t really have a way to pay for the rest of college.”
Pelot said she has already been able to pay off at least half of her student loans with the money won from the pageants at both the local and the state level. She said that even participating in the national Miss America competition guarantees her some scholarship money, which will help even more with her loans.
Despite what is seen on the television, pageants like Miss America are not all about picking the perfect ball gown and answering questions from the judges. Pelot said instead of paying an entry fee to enter the pageant, contestants raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospital. She said she has already raised $1,000 for that charity.
“When you realize how much you’ve been able to raise, just by competing, when you didn’t win, you still raise that money,” Pelot said. “That was pretty cool. We also do a lot with the hospitals. I’ve been able to visit a couple of the hospitals the last few weeks.”
As a contestant, Pelot also promotes her own cause — literacy. Through her Open Books, Open Opportunity: Promoting Literacy in Our Communities, Pelot visits libraries to work with various events and campaigns that promote literacy.
Promoting literacy satisfies “Service,” one of the four “points in the crown” — which also include Scholarship, Success and Style — emphasized by the Miss America Organization. Pelot said she picked literacy as her platform for the pageants because her parents, who are both teachers, taught her to love reading.
“They (her parents) both went to school to be teachers when my brother and I were younger, so I remember … when they would need to practice a lesson, they would use us,” Pelot said. “I remember, as a young child, they would have a reading event and I would help them pick the books for that.”
While her active promotion of literacy and involvement with libraries may have started with the Miss America pageants, Pelot said she has come to realize that the work she does is something she wants to keep doing, even after she is done competing.
“That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about more and more,” she said. “During ‘Give a Kid a Book,’ that’s when I realized just how important my platform really was. Just the fact that giving access to a book was so important, and I just thought that this is something I want to be involved in for quite some time. I want to keep volunteering and giving back. That is something the Miss America organization has really honed in on and taught me. It has helped me realize the importance of it (volunteering).”
Along with inspiring her service platform, Pelot said her parents, Jennifer and Scott, and brother, Ty, have been very instrumental in helping her prepare for each competition. She said they help her with everything from practicing interview questions and picking her outfits, to talking on the phone with her during long car rides and bringing her to the movies for some much-needed rest.
Jennifer said she is quite proud of her daughter and enjoys seeing her grow with each pageant.
“She has always been determined and she has always known what she wanted to do,” she said. “She has grown into such a well-rounded woman. I can see her doing such big things that I never realized before. … She has become so articulate and poised, even more than she was. I’ve seen her grow tremendously all around.”
Pelot said others in the community have also been very helpful, especially the dance studios that allowed her to practice her talent, even though she wasn’t a member.
The Miss America pageant will be broadcast live Sept. 11 on ABC.
http://www.htrnews.com/story/news/2016/08/24/courtney-pelot-miss-wisconsin-manitowoc-miss-america-atlantic-city/89298630/