By the end of spring semester, students from three Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools will have made 200 dresses for girls at the Sulmac Primary School in Lari, Kenya.
The middle school students are working with Little Dresses for Africa, a nonprofit organization that sends dresses to young girls in orphanages, churches and schools in African countries.
The project started last fall when Phillips Middle School teacher Jennifer Marquis piloted the project in her “Career and Technical Education” classes.
“It was fantastic, we ended up making 49 dresses,” Marquis said. “The kids were enthusiastic — they loved it.”
Marquis said this year’s goal is to make 150 more dresses between the three schools.
Cheryl Cureton, a teacher at Culbreth Middle School, suggested the idea to Marquis and Debra Freeman of McDougle Middle School at a summer conference last year. The three women decided to make it a professional learning community project, meaning the middle schools would all work together on the project.
Little Dresses for Africa provides the pattern for the dresses — made out of pillowcases — on their website. Marquis collected the pillowcases for her class through parent, student and staff donations, and she purchased the remainder with her allotted PTSA funds.
Typically, participants send their dresses to the organization’s headquarters in Michigan, where they are sent out. However, Marquis’s teaching assistant Benjamin Davis is traveling to Kenya in August with the World Overcomers Christian Church, and he has offered to deliver them to the school he will visit.
More than 60 seventh and eighth grade students have been working on the project each semester at Phillips Middle School alone.
