On Friday, Sept. 6, members of the Windsor High School Student Council held a dress-swapping event called “Shop Til You Drop” for homecoming. Students could come and shop free dresses for homecoming, enter into a raffle and take home coupons for local businesses.
Student Council gathered donations from the community. “We have over 100 dresses, many of them are brand new with tags,” co-adviser of Student Council Amanda Kendrot (staff) said.
The idea started last school year when members of Student Council wanted to help the environment as well as their local community. Executive secretary Bella Kendrot (11) said, “We wanted to help reduce waste in the community, as well as ensure that everybody had an opportunity to go to Homecoming with something they loved.”
The event wasn’t able to happen last year but the idea came to life “when Student Council decided to have student-led committees,” A. Kendrot said.
One major fear was if they would have enough dresses for everyone. Executive co-president Leah Bacon shared, “One of the hardest things, I think, was finding dresses and getting people to actually donate dresses. It was a slow start for donations, but after we kept getting the word out, more people started really bringing it. We had to really dig to find some of them.”
The event was a success, with more than 50 people participating and over half the dresses being taken. “This was the most fun and joy-filled event I have participated in so far at WHS,” A. Kendrot shared.
Student Council foresees continuing this event for every school dance. “We want to be able to put this on for the following years, as well as for Sadie’s and prom this year,” B. Kendrot said.
Leftover dresses will be used in future dress-swapping events. “We are actually just going to store them in the basement on the garment racks, covered to be kept clean so that we can use them for future events,” A. Kendrot said.
The Student Council hopes to grow their number of donations, planning on keeping their donation box available for the entire school year. “Hopefully we can start getting girls right after homecoming to start dumping their dresses into the donation bin right away,” Bacon said.
Talks of partnering with other schools are in the works. A. Kendrot said, “We may even try and reach out to other districts and see if they want to shuffle inventory so we can have new inventory available all the time.”
