About $600 for a limousine, $100 for dinner, another $100 for shoes and accessories, $200 for a dress or tuxedo and $20 for a ticket to prom — it can easily cost high school students more than $1,000 for that iconic night.
But a couple of teachers from Decatur High School want to help senior high school girls take a good $100-$300 off of that price tag.
Over dinner, teachers Carol Edmonson and Genie Storvick came up with plans to create Decatur’s first loaning closet, later dubbed Meagan’s Closet. They wondered what they would do with their daughters’ expensive prom dresses they had purchased over time.
After months of planning, Meagan’s Closet was able to come together with the help of Decatur’s dance team. Edmonson and Storvick hosted a grand opening for Meagan’s Closet last Friday, just in time for prom season.
“We thought what a wonderful service this would be for all the senior high school girls in our district,” Edmonson said, who is also the academic advisor for the school’s dance team. “We want this to be a place to empower our young women, allow them to experience prom or homecoming when maybe they otherwise couldn’t afford to.”
Meagan’s Closet is open to all high school senior girls in the Federal Way Public Schools district.
Storvick, a personal finances teacher, said she typically asks her students if they are going to prom and has determined about 30 percent say they can’t go because it’s too costly.
“I actually did a lesson and that was one of the examples for spending plans and being a smart shopper — the example was that a prom dress is $100,” Storvick said. “And then one, of course, one of the girls said, ‘Well who uses those again?’ I’m like, ‘Meagan’s Closet does!’”
The space for the dresses was once an office but teachers mainly used that room for its copy machine, Edmonson said.
After getting approval to use the room, Storvick and Edmonson got to work. They sought donations from fellow students and from their daughters who had no use for their old homecoming and prom dresses.
“My daughter was going to nursing school down in North Carolina at Duke and she went ahead and told some of her fellow students and when she graduated this December, we brought a whole huge suitcase of 12 dresses that people she went to school with out there said, ‘We’d love to donate our dresses,’” Edmonson said. “So it has just started to grow.”
With help from Umpqua Bank’s $1,000 donation and another $200 from Mary Kay dealer Cheri Hardman, the teachers stocked the closet with accessories, decorations, a mirror and bench so that girls feel comfortable when they shop.
Coming up with the name for their loaning closet was hard at first but then it was a no-brainer.
“We were coming up with different names … and I was on my way home and it just came to us,” Edmonson said. “We can call it Meagan’s Closet. What a great tribute it would be to her because she was so involved.”
Meagan Jones, a 2009 Decatur High School alumna, passed away at the age of 23 from cancer.
Her parents, Beth and Tom Jones, who were also at the grand opening of Meagan’s Closet, said their daughter was involved in leadership, Distributive Education Clubs of America and was the grade checker for basketball but her real interest was in helping children at the YMCA as a youth leader.
Struggling with diabetes since the age of 8, Meagan Jones was in and out of the hospital for a few days with a condition called diabetic ketoacidosis. She attended Highline College for two years after high school and transferred to Central Washington University. That’s when they became aware of other health issues.
“She went to school and she got a side ache,” her mother recalled.
“Instead of getting better, it got worse,” Tom Jones added. “The doctor pressed on her stomach a few times and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to the ER’ and five days later they took a big fist-size tumor out of her colon.”
After surgery and treatments, she was pronounced cancer free.
Meagan Jones even reflected on her struggles in a video as she held up signs with words, “To say it hit me like a ton of bricks would be an understatement,” and “Giving up is not an option … You pray because only HE can understand. You fight because you know you can. You never give up because it is not an option.”
She wrote she was determined she would not be the 80 percent who didn’t survive that form of cancer.
Meagan Jones got to spend time living in a house with her girlfriends, studying sociology and psychology at Central to one day be a counselor for children. She got to “really experience being over there,” her father said.
She had about seven months of a “normal life” until her family discovered the doctor’s news was premature.
In March 2013, doctors discovered another tumor in her ovaries. Although both of her ovaries were removed, the cancer moved to her stomach.
“It was all over the place,” Tom Jones said. “She lived another year. She came back. We first found out in late March, and she passed away the next March, which was a year ago.”
He said Meagan’s Closet would be something his daughter would be so much in favor of.
“It’s nice, and I mean there are plenty of gals who just can’t afford a dress that looks like a dress …,” Tom Jones said. “The whole culture now is you go out in a limo and $250 dinner and I mean that, quite frankly, is ridiculous and it puts pressure on [students].”
Beth Jones said some of her daughter’s high school dance dresses were donated to the loaning closet.
“She didn’t really pick anything, she didn’t go overboard,” she said. “She could find inexpensive dresses until prom — she was on the court during prom her senior year.”
Captain of Decatur’s dance team Alyssa Anderson said she would hate for anyone to not have the fun experiences of a dance just because of money.
“I’ve tried on some of the dresses and want to borrow them,” Anderson said. “… The more dresses we obtain, the more variety.”
Also, privacy is key.
To set up a private appointment to shop for a dress (sizes 0-24), high school seniors in Federal Way should contact Carol Edmonson at cedmonso@fwps.org, Genie Storvick at gstorvic@fwps.org or call Decatur at 253-945-5383.
Dresses are reserved using only the student’s school identification number. Dresses are expected to be returned one week after the school dance they are worn for.
Organizers of Meagan’s Closet are still seeking dress donations, monetary donations and business services — such as dry cleaning or hairstyling. To help Meagan’s Closet grow, contact Carol Edmonson at cedmonso@fwps.org or Genie Storvick at gstorvic@fwps.org.
Meagan Jones
