The Prom Dress Drive is something that many J-D students don’t know about. It is a service available for students to borrow dresses for events like prom and ball, with many options to choose from. J-DHS gym teacher Mrs. Goldberg shares that she started the drive around 20 years ago when she first started working at the school. “Mr. Hartley had like seven dresses in the back office and he was like ‘Will you help me do this, I don’t know anything about dresses and we’ve got some people that could use them for prom,’ and I’m like ‘yeah sure I’ll take over,” she says. Over the years, she’s worked on building onto the collection of dresses. She expresses how expensive prom dresses can be and how some people go to multiple proms, not wanting to have to buy multiple dresses.
Mrs. Goldberg states that they’ve had donations from boom babies, department stores that were going out of business, and even students who ordered dresses online, which didn’t fit them and couldn’t be returned. “Some were brand new with tags on them,” she expresses.
Construction this past summer has caused issues with the storage of the dresses and they are now being kept in an old office in the blue hallway. “In the past I’ve had some teachers help me keep them organized. I’ve had some students that have offered to help because there’s probably 200+ dresses at this point and especially because they’re getting moved around because they didn’t have a spot for them in the school. I’ve got a couple of students coming in on Friday [March 10] to help me,” she states.
Students looking to help with the drive or to donate dresses should reach out to her, whether that be by email or finding her in the fitness center. “I’m actually booking for help because every year we have more and more students that are taking advantage of it and sometimes I’m not free when they can come, so if a student has a study hall, they can take them down and I can get it open for them and they can look for the dresses,” she says.
Mrs. Goldberg encourages students to borrow the dresses, which they can get altered to their liking and mentions that it’s also good for the environment. “We have so much stuff in this world that isn’t used. We already have 200 beautiful dresses, why not come get one rather than order one to get mass produced again,” Goldberg urges.
