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Anything But Politics

By Callimachus | Related entries in Good Decisions

homecoming

Sick of bickering and bitterness? Here’s a gem of good news to relieve the day’s ugliness. When Hurricane Katrina wiped out a swath of the Mississippi gulf coast, it took hundreds of lives and mansions and shacks alike were blown to splinters.

Many local people from up here in southeastern Pennsylvania, where I live, went down to help. Lineman crews helped bring back the lights. A local undertaker/assistant coroner tried to identify the dead — those that hadn’t washed out to sea. A local high school up this way asked what it could do, and eventually the principal of Long Beach High School down on the coast came up with an idea:

Sponsor homecoming.

The local high school, Lampeter-Strasburg, pitched in with a will. Other schools in the area pitched in as well, as did local businesses. Soon they had enough donations and dresses to put on a homecoming dance at both Long Beach and Pass Christian high schools.

Last week, 40 students from Lampeter-Strasburg drove down to the disaster area with at least $15,000 worth of clothes and food and supplies, along with $35,000 in donated cash. The girl in the AP photo above is trying on a prom dress from the racks and racks of them the local kids brought down with them.

It seems like such a small thing, a minor high school ritual in a place scoured down to the bedrock by a furious storm. Most of the students living in temporary shelter, the high school cracked and flooded. But a small touch of celebration, and one night of forgetting it all to dance and dress up turned out to be just what the shell-shocked students needed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 and is filed under Good Decisions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Anything But Politics”

Red County, California » Carnival of Hurricane Relief, #10 Says:
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:25 am
[...] Anything But PoliticsIn which the blogger tells how high schools in Pennsylvania sponsored homecoming for devastated schools in Long Beach, MS [...]

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