Current Event Article
Unit (s): 1 & 5
Questions:
 What is civic virtue? Give examples of people who
practice civic virtue in your school and community.
 How does a responsible citizen promote the common
good?
Synopsis: A non-profit organization collects prom dresses to give to victims of
Hurricane Sandy for free.
Sandy victims get free
prom dresses
Tweentribune.com
April 7, 2013
Girls whose families were wiped out by
Superstorm Sandy can still party in style,
thanks to a New York City charity that
has collected more than 1,000 prom
dresses for the storm's victims.
The nonprofit group Where to Turn held
a free dress expo at a Staten Island high
school Saturday for teenagers whose
families lost homes and cars in the massive storm. People from all over the
country, as well as a Hollywood marketing firm and a prom dress company in
New England, contributed gowns to the event, held in a neighborhood
devastated by flooding.
The group has held smaller dress giveaways in recent years to help kids from
down-and-out families afford prom night, but this year's event took on new
Howard County Public School System
Current Event Article
significance after the storm damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of homes in
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
"Right now, people are rebuilding and they don't have enough money to take
care of the normal day-to-day things ... things that, you know, kids really
shouldn't miss out on," said Where to Turn executive director Dennis McKeon.
Among the roughly 125 teenagers who came through the expo was Katie
Zukhovich, 15, whose home on the Staten Island waterfront filled with 7 feet of
water during the storm. She picked out a black dress with a low slit in the back.
"It's really nice," she said. "Dresses are usually really expensive." The family also
lost a car in the flood.
Where to Turn was originally founded to help victims of the 9/11 terror attacks but
has branched out into a variety of other charitable endeavors over the past
decade. At the dress expo Saturday, it also had 250 pairs of donated shoes and
$5,000 worth of hair accessories donated by Conair. A Staten Island dry cleaning
company cleaned all 1,000 dresses for nothing.
"We had long, elegant, beaded gowns to short dresses to everything in
between," McKeon said, adding that "I don't know much about this stuff because
I have three sons."
The organization still has hundreds more dresses to give away. McKeon said he
planned on approaching leaders in Queens to see about having a dress expo
there for hard-hit kids in the Rockaway beach communities.
Howard County Public School System