CONNECTICUT, USA — Connecticut's newest Miss America titleholders are ready to hit the ground running and make a name for themselves.
Two weeks ago, 24-year-old New Britain native Sylvana Maria Gonzalez Torres was crowned the newest Miss Connecticut, and 14-year-old Bristol-native Peyton Troth won the Miss Connecticut's Outstanding Teen title.
Troth is no stranger to the pageant world. With the help of her mom, a former Miss Hartford County, Troth has been hitting the stage since she was a year old.
She's continuing to knock out her goals at a young age. Troth founded and serves as director of her non-profit organization 'Peyton's Promise Education Initiative.'
"It actually started in my classroom," Troth explained. "We were taking a math test and out of the 15 kids in my class, 10 of us needed a pencil. So, I kind of thought to myself this can't just be in my classroom, it could be in the classroom next door, the classroom across the hallway and classrooms across the country."
Through her non-profit, students across Connecticut now have one less thing to worry about when they're in class.
Troth has big aspirations for the future, she hopes to win the 100th Miss Connecticut title when she's of age.
She also said she wants to create a Peyton's Promise School in Bristol, attend college at Syracuse University and become a sports reporter at ESPN.
Gonzalez first competed for the Miss Connecticut crown in 2017.
She had been following in the footsteps of her family members, attending Central Connecticut State University but she had to make a change in direction.
"I had this moment in that timeframe where I was experiencing domestic violence and was trying to figure out who I was beyond that experience," Gonzalez said. "I reached a point where I thought I need to drop out of school and spend as much time as possible recuperating myself and my mental wellness and I needed to find a community of people that showed me what that looked like."
She found that community within the Miss America Organization.
"Miss America was there through all of those phases and supplied so many opportunities for me to advance and grow, and discover who I was without shaming me in the process for making mistakes," Gonzalez said. "They were our mentors, they were our friends. They put us in front of people to practice what it was like to be in a professional environment and then gave us a scholarship to be able to move forward for educational advancement."
She uses her platform to bring awareness to domestic and family violence and visits schools as "Dr. Love" to empower children to treat others with kindness.
"I felt like I need to talk about this on a wider scale where it's not just the statistics about 1 in 3 women being abused and 1 in 4 men," said Gonzalez. "I needed to talk about it on a larger scale, like, how do we actually end the cycle of abuse and what does that look like?"
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Symphonie Privett is an anchor and host of The Buzz at FOX61 News. She can be reached at sprivett@fox61.com. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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