A high-school classroom became a temporary dressing room Friday at Pimmit Hills Alternative High School as adult students tried on fancy gowns from “Cinderella’s Closet” to get ready for the End-of-School Dance on June 6.
It’s called a dance, rather than a prom, to acknowledge the maturity of the Pimmit Hills students, who are mostly adults. Jeans and athletic wear are not acceptable dress for the dance.
Pimmit Hills is a high school for students 16 and over, many of them developing English as a second language.
Others have returned to school after dropping out for a while or simply didn’t thrive in a traditional high-school setting. At Pimmit Hills “It’s more of an adult setting,” said Diane Collum, the school’s Career Center specialist.
CINDERELLA’S CLOSET was started more than a year ago by Thomas Jefferson High School (TJ) student Lauren Connelly of Chantilly, who wanted to bring affordable, first-quality gowns within reach of female students who might not otherwise be able to afford them.
She began by asking her friends to donate dresses they had worn to one of TJ’s four annual dances but soon decided she wanted to offer nice, new dresses for Cinderella’s Closet. So Lauren Connelly wrote to department stores and asked for donations.
Two — Hecht’s in Ballston and Lord & Taylor in New York — responded by donating new dresses. Hecht’s gave about 175 from their warehouse, and Lord & Taylor in New York donated 22 new formals from their sales floor, said Connelly’s mother, Sandra Connelly, a guidance counselor at TJ.
Lauren Connelly collected a total of about 500 dresses. She also got donations from hairdressers, restaurants and Fair Oaks Mall, which she gave away through Cinderella’s Closet.
The program was publicized to social workers in homeless and transitional programs and through the public schools.
The dresses were taken to several different locations, to be offered for sale at nominal cost.
Collum, a career counselor at Pimmit Hills, heard about it and contacted Sandra Connelly to arrange for the dresses to be taken to Pimmit Hills for sale on May 3.
For one day and $1, students could try on and buy dresses, modeling them in front of other students in the makeshift dressing room that had been set up for the day in a classroom.
Computers were temporarily pushed behind racks of dresses that Lauren Connelly set up in the classroom, with help from Collum and teachers Didi Crowder and Lynn Worfield.
After they stepped behind a modesty screen to put on the gowns, the students stepped out to be admired by other students and the teachers, who smiled and offered their comments.
A seamstress was present to make alterations.
BY THE END of the day, 55 students had purchased dresses at $1 each to wear to the End-of-School Dance to be held at the school on June 6.
Now that she is a graduating senior, Lauren Connelly is turning over her dress racks and about 75 unsold dresses in her inventory to Pimmit Hills Alternative School, to be sold later. They will be offered to students at Pimmit Hills again on Wednesday, May 8.
Several dresses were also sold to residents of shelters, said Sandra Connelly.
Lauren Connelly operated Cinderella’s Closet while completing her senior year at TJ. She also applied for admission to 10 colleges, gaining acceptance to all of them.
She plans to attend the University of Southern California this fall, where she will major in cinema and film production, her mother said.