GUERNSEY – Walking down the hallway of Guernsey-Sunrise High School, the locked door next to the art room blends into the wall as nothing more than a janitorial closet.
But for a small number of students, what is inside the closet has been life-changing.
“This one is my old dress. And this one was my sister’s,” said Laura Green, lifting a long, beaded white gown from the rack in the closet.
“They’re already saying, ‘I get that one, right?’” she said of her eighth grade students who are eyeing the wardrobe for their ninth grade homecoming. “I’m like, ‘No! First come, first served!’ But they’re already talking about what dresses they want to wear.”
Green, 27, is in her second year teaching art in Platte County School District #2. Her first year, she asked her class of high school students whether they would attend the homecoming dance. Four students told her no, their families could not afford a dress.
Green’s reaction was: that’s not right.
“I thought about how many dresses do I have sitting at home?” she remembered. “I went on a collecting mission and started messaging people I went to high school with and putting up on social media and had tons of people reach out and donate dresses.”
Now she has approximately 225 dresses of all colors, sizes, and lengths crammed into the closet. Strapless. Sequined. Ribbons and tulle.
“I go hard!” she laughed, engulfed by dress racks on every side. “I’m just here to help girls gain confidence.”
The poverty rate in the town of Guernsey is nearly 19%, almost double Wyoming’s statewide average of 11%.
“We’ve got a lot of kids going through some pretty heavy stuff,” explained Connie Hollin, the school’s librarian. “And if for a night or two they can be pretty and have somebody care about them and look at them outside of just the educational setting,” that matters, she said.
A tiny collection of dresses already existed at Guernsey-Sunrise before Green arrived. But she felt the dresses were dated and unappealing to students.
“I’m hoping that as the younger generation gets in there, they know, ‘she has really good quality dresses.’ I’m hoping that quality can get even better.”
Nationally, other organizations run similar programs on a larger scale. Becca’s Closet has chapters in 28 states, but not Wyoming. Operation PROM requires that students demonstrate financial need and be recommended by a guidance counselor to receive a dress or tuxedo.
While the Guernsey-Sunrise administration supported the initiative, the dress closet has its limitations. It is too small to serve as a dressing room. Accepting further donations is difficult.
And ultimately, Green’s vision is more expansive.
This summer, she began fundraising to purchase a trailer. She plans to transform it into a mobile dress closet, visiting rural high schools before homecomings and proms, allowing girls to browse and borrow dresses. (She is open to collecting clothes for boys, too, if she had the space.)
She trekked to the Scotts Bluff County Fair in July, where she raised $1,500 selling her own artwork and paintings her students donated. She painted sharks, fish, and spiderwebs on faces, and her dad donated packages of beef for a raffle.
Green also sought sponsorships and began a GoFundMe page. Altogether, about $2,800 rolled in for the trailer - an amount that is feasible, but still at the low end.
She has not discussed the plan with any of the schools she wants to serve, but there are signs that her initiative would be welcome.
Although Torrington High School currently has a dress program, “students aren’t always willing to come take a dress from people they know they will run into later,” said Principal Chase Christensen. “If a business, church, etc. would be willing to take over, we would gladly donate the dresses.”
After growing up in Morrill, Green and her family moved to Torrington when she became the art teacher. Preparing for her own school dances, she recalled, was a group task.
“We’d be like, ‘hey, you can wear my dress from homecoming last year.’ Or, ‘you can wear this one that I bought and never wore.’ I always grew up getting ready for dances together with my group of friends. I think that’s probably where I grew to love that kind of a thing.”
Green recreated that environment for her students, too. She recruited volunteers to come to the library to style hair and put makeup on her high schoolers hours before the dances.
“Some of the girls had never even had their hair done by someone else,” said Hollin. “They saw themselves differently. One young lady, she just kept saying, ‘I can’t believe I can look this way.’ She kept looking in the mirror because - I don’t know if she didn’t recognize herself or just that difference it was for her.”
Guernsey-Sunrise’s new principal, Liesl Sisson, was an instructor at the time the prom dress program began. She believed that affordability was the cause, but Green’s makeshift beauty salon provided a social and emotional boost to the girls.
“It definitely stemmed out of an economic need,” Sisson said. “But then she’s also very friendly and charismatic and the kids gravitate toward her and want to be a part of things she does.”
A professional photographer captured Green and three of her girls at the April prom, each with long, curling hair and flowing dresses. For one of them, the dress closet was transformational.
“She never felt beautiful,” Green said. “I told her, ‘I’m going to get you to go to prom.’ She said, ‘you’re never gonna get me in a dress.’”
Green then searched for the right gown.
“She’s a little bit bigger of a girl, so I hunted for a dress that I knew she’d feel confident in. I finally found one. But it was kind of lacey and I was like, ‘I don’t know if she’s going to like it.’ But she put it on and she just had tears. She just was like, ‘wow, I actually feel pretty.’”
Green’s eyes lit up. “And that’s what it’s about.”
