The Missoulian: High School Seniors Save Money on Prom to Donate to People In-Need Abroad

The Missoulian

Smart planning, shopping net $2,000 that students will donate to tsunami victims

By ROB CHANEY

Juniors Carrie Marshall, Janet McKenzie, Kirstin Marne and Natalie Meismer, from left, assess their color options while decorating for Sentinel High School's prom Friday morning. The wall behind them is donated particleboard from last year's prom. They have repainted it to go with the "Pirates of Flamingo Bay" theme.
Photo by LIZ GRAUMAN/Missoulian

Sentinel High School prom-goers will see the real underside of Paris on Saturday night, and - surprise - it's a Caribbean pirate town.

In a growing effort to make prom decorations reusable and recyclable, this year's Sentinel junior class is turning last year's particleboard Paris streetscape into Tortugas, the base of Capt. Jack Sparrow and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" crew.

They bought Christmas lights in January at 90 percent off, and dragged in a homecoming parade float for a beached lifeboat display.

In the process, they've accumulated about $2,000 in unspent decoration funds to send to Sri Lanka for tsunami relief.

"It would just be greedy for us to spend that money when we have so much stuff in the basement," said junior class president Adam Ward. "We fund-raise the same amount, but now we can spend so much of it on tsunami relief."

Math teacher Sue Dolezal, one of the adult coordinators of the prom decorating crew, said the use of one-time displays can be amazingly wasteful.

"In one prom catalog, there was a paper waterfall that costs $1,000," Dolezal said. "It can be used once. Some years, we'd spend $3,000 or $4,000 on the prom and on Sunday we'd put $2,000 of that in the trash. This year, there may be $50 worth of decorations in the trash."

A similar effort last year produced about $1,000 in donations to Kenya. The money was sent to Brian Theroux, a Sentinel graduate who was working there in the Peace Corps. This year's Sri Lankan donation will follow a similar channel.

"That way we can make sure 100 percent of our donations go to the area," Dolezal said.

The 2005 Sentinel theme is the Pirate Prom at Flamingo Bay. Sentinel's speech and debate team contributed a flock of plastic flamingos that it uses in a fund-raising stunt at other times of the year. Groves of palm trees came from the stockpile of a previous dance. And most of the disposable stuff was donated.

Along the particleboard Tortugas town, junior Amanda Brown was putting the detail touches in the windows and doorways on Friday. She said she searched out Web sites of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie for set ideas. The wall runs 92 feet along the Sentinel gym bleachers, attached by an ingenious bracket system that doesn't harm the seats.

"We wanted it to be a rough and dirty pirate town," Brown said. "All this paint is donated from parents and stores. The palm tree trunks are carpet rolls."

More than 100 students have pitched in on fund-raising, designing or setup and take-down efforts, Dolezal said. On Saturday night, about 450 will come to dance and memorialize their high school fellowship. On Sunday, it will all have to be packed up and taken away.

"We've been spending hours of teacher-aide time and study halls working on this," said junior Janet McKenzie. "But you're never too tired to dance."