Moser School of ... life lessons

There are schools in Guttenberg, Edgewood, Dyersville and Strawberry Point.

There are also studios in Manchester, Clermont, Independence and Monticello.

There are students — female and male — spread across northeast Iowa, former students spread across the state, the country and globe.

They are dancers, cheerleaders, gymnasts and tumblers. And wrestlers.

But they are so much more thanks to the Moser School of Dance and Gymnastics.

Debbie Moser — who runs the schools with her sister Carmen Moser Payne with help from Kattie Payne Schulte and Luka Marie Schulte (Carmen’s daughter and granddaughter) — didn’t hesitate when asked about the legacy the Moser schools hope to leave students.

“Everything we teach in our classroom is respect and lessons you can use for a lifetime,” she said.

Then, in an email a few minutes later, she elaborated on that thought.

“We teach more than dance and gymnastics,” she wrote. “We teach life lessons that will last a lifetime. We stress respect, kindness, caring, sportsmanship, goal setting, how to work hard to meet those goals ... How to handle the ups and downs, patience.

“We tell our students all the time ‘we are the luckiest people in the world to know them and to be able to share our love of dance and gymnastics with them all these years.’ We tell them to thank their parents and grandparents for giving them these opportunities and experiences to take lessons and/or compete.”

She practices what she and Carmen preach and gave credit where credit was due. Bernita Moser, Debbie and Carmen’s mother, is the heart and soul of the schools.

Growing up on a farm near Garber, Bernita drove to Dubuque so Debbie and Carmen could participate in dance and gymnastics.

“Our mom gave us a wonderful career,” Debbie said of the now 90-year-old Bernita.

It’s a career that has lasted more than 50 years and been honored with competition titles, trips around the world and that aforementioned legacy that lives on in thousands of students young and old.

“Enough to keep us busy for a lifetime,” Debbie said when asked to estimate how many students the school has touched.

Debbie went to college to become a teacher, Carmen a nurse. But the pull of dance and gymnastics never left them, so they started with a school in Guttenberg, then moved into Edgewood and Manchester, and ...

“I just wanted to keep going and going ... we loved it so much,” Debbie said, but “we would never go into a town where somebody else taught.”

There once were more schools in Oelwein and even Prairie du Chien, Wis. But it stretched the resources so thin that Carmen and Debbie focused on the eight aforementioned towns.

One thing has remained constant.

“It’s always been a family atmosphere,” Debbie said.

The schools teach dance but now focus on power tumbling — “it’s evolved,” Debbie said — where students perform a series of “acrobatic skills” down a 42-foot (beginners) or 84-foot mat, “doing jumps, twists and flips placing only their hands and feet on the track.”

“Sometimes the hands never touch the ground,” Debbie said.

Moser School of Dance and Gymnastics is good, too. The team won the overall team title at the United States Tumbling Association Iowa State Championships. At the USTA nationals last week, Moser finished fifth.

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They had 102 qualifiers at “the largest USTA national ever,” Debbie said. Iowa State sophomore Annie Gulick won an elite level national title.

“We’re really, really pleased with our kids,” Debbie said.

In addition to those life lessons, Debbie and Carmen want their students to be kids, too. The required time in class is less than a lot of other programs.

“Some of these kids, that’s all they do,” Debbie said. “They eat, live and sleep in the gym ... you know how busy these kids are.

“Most of our kids are in other sports .... the time they are in the gym, we use very well.”

And give these students something they can take with them wherever life’s road takes them.

Comments: (319) 398-8461; jr.ogden@thegazette.com