Stop by an outdoor festival, neighborhood picnic, or even an office park during lunch hour, and you might spot an EdTerp serving frozen treats from a converted school bus, painted blue and white and emblazoned with the words “COOL BUS.”
As owner and operator of I C Dream, recently retired teacher Carol Pisciotta ’96 has been dishing out ice cream and shaved ice since 2019. Upbeat pop music blares from the bus’s radio as Pisciotta serves her desserts. A friend found the stripped-down bus, which Pisciotta has nicknamed “Bessie,” on Craigslist.
“I thought it was super neat, being a teacher, to end up with a bus,” she says.
Appropriately for a future Terp, Pisciotta’s lifelong passion for ice cream and frozen desserts began with special childhood trips to the Maryland Dairy with her dad. She enjoyed dreaming up her own flavors and recalls, “My dad was brave enough to let me in the kitchen.” There, she whipped up concoctions like blueberry-strawberry-banana.
Today, she says her most popular ice cream flavors are cappuccino crunch and cookies and cream. She prides herself on making all her own syrups for her shaved ice, such as key lime, coffee and special blends of tropical flavors, using cane sugar, natural dyes, and fruit extracts, juices and purees. Customers can choose from toppings like graham cracker crumbs, caramel, or coconut cream, as well as pretzel or chocolate cookie specialty cones, alongside the more traditional sugar, cake and waffle varieties.
And what’s Piscotta’s favorite item on her menu? It’s a treat her mom named “Snow Cream”—shaved ice on the bottom, with a scoop of ice cream on top—which she calls “the best of both worlds.”
At first, Pisciotta envisioned I C Dream as a summer job (“I thought it’d be more fun than to teach summer school,” she says) but she soon found that spring and fall were her busiest seasons, as she served at weddings, birthday parties and other events. She continued to teach and run her business simultaneously for seven years. This past spring, she retired from her 30-year career in Montgomery County Public Schools—where she had served first as an upper elementary classroom teacher and later as a P.E. and health teacher in both elementary and middle schools—to dedicate her full attention to her business.
“I'm down to one job. I'm very excited about that,” she says.
According to Pisciotta, the skills she honed in the College of Education and as a teacher—such as being organized and detail-oriented, and making people feel welcome and appreciated—come in handy as a small business owner. And just like in her teaching career, where her favorite moments were watching kids’ eyes light up when they achieved a goal, she finds that the most rewarding part of running her business is “putting smiles on people's faces.”
