Catie's closet turns high school into the mall

DRACUT, Mass. — The first few steps inside the Catie's Closet distribution center are met with a visual explosion - an array of colors from thousands of girls shirts, tank tops and sweatshirts hanging from racks stretching the length of a wall.

On the other side of the room, Catie's Closet Executive Director Mickey Cockrell points at more of the donated inventory - racks hanging with boys' button-down shirts, and shelves to the ceilings, stacked with piles of jeans categorized as "flare, boot or skinny."

In another section of the space, several bins are pushed together and overflowing with grocery bags full of used-clothes donations gathered during the week and waiting to be inventoried.

"And it's only Wednesday," Cockrell said.

Cockrell's sister, Denise Trombly, Catie's Closet director of operations, handles the inventory work. She's at a laptop in the center of the room, entering the new items into the system so they can be placed on the racks and shelves with everything else.

This is just one of several rooms that comprise the 10,000 square feet of space that make up the Dracut-based distribution center for the organization. Cockrell calls it "command central."

These items will eventually be sent to Catie's Closets distribution sites located inside roughly 65 schools stretching from the Merrimack Valley to Boston. The organization helps 30,000 students - from pre-kindergarten to high school - below the poverty line or temporarily in need.

Catie's Closet uses around 300 volunteers to make it happen.

The centuries-old structure on School Street that houses the distribution center was formerly a textile mill. On the outside, it's an aged, cold and rather sterile setting, but the inside has been lit up by clothes and other merchandise brandishing anything from Mickey Mouse's face to tags with popular name brands.

"What you're seeing in this core part of the distribution center is what every child needs," Cockrell said.

"A hoodie, a tank, tees, jeans. This is what every high-school and grade-school kid wants. Of the 10,000 square feet that we have, this is the central nucleus that we pull from every single day."

"And there's more," she adds.

That's an understatement.

Cockrell and Trombly took time to show off several rooms inside the distribution center. The spaces included shelves lined with bottles of shampoo, detergent, body soap and toothpaste. There are also rooms with ties, belts, hairbrushes, combs, hair ties, scarves and handbags. There's everything from feminine and shaving products, deodorant, makeup and makeup remover, and dresses, swimwear, school supplies and uniforms.

"It's Christmas every day at Catie's Closet," said Cockrell, while showing off a room dedicated to shoes and sneakers, brand new and still in a box.

Catie Bisson, Cockrell and Trombly's niece, was the inspiration for Catie's Closet. Bisson, a 2008 graduate of Lowell High, died at age 20 in March 2010 due to a connective tissue disorder called Loeys-Dietz syndrome. During her lifetime, she had 40 surgeries, with her first major heart surgery at age 10.

Cockrell said her niece's first question to doctors during her time at the hospital was typically, "When can I get back to school?"

Bisson, who aspired to be a writer and editor, did not believe education should be a privilege, and cherished the opportunity to learn. Lowell High School approached Bisson's family, including her parents Anne-Marie Sousa and Victor Bisson, to see if they would consider a scholarship in Bisson's name. The thought among her family was a scholarship would be to the benefit of only one student at a time.

"So the idea of Catie's Closet was born," Cockrell said.

It comes from the fact that chronic absence is a problem in school characterized by higher levels of student poverty. Missing school leads to lost instructional time. Over time, the gaps in attendance create difficulties in student learning and decreases academic achievement. These issues advance to potentially dropping out. The problems snowball into adulthood.

According to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, chronic absence is defined as missing 10 percent of school days over the course of the school year. Numbers from the department show that during the 2015-16 school year, about 15.5 percent of students experience chronic absence nationwide, with 13.6 percent in Massachusetts. At Lowell High, that number is 18 percent.

The goal of Catie's Closet is to improve school attendance by providing an in-school resource of clothing and basic necessities to students below the poverty line. It also provides emergency packages for those temporarily in need. For example, Catie's Closet opened the door to students in need following the recent gas explosions in Lawrence.

"We're still developing the organization," Cockrell said. "We're still building it. For that, you have to invest your time and energy."

"Not to mention there's so much need," Trombly added. "It's relatively impossible to even wrap your mind around the number of students who require help. That's our mission. To help them so they stay in school. So, we stay here until we get it done."

Here's how it works: Donations are gathered, inventoried and placed where they belong at the distribution center. The merchandise is then moved to the individual Catie's Closets, which are converted spaces inside each participating school. Students who need the items are given free and discreet access to the closet by faculty members. The space is regularly restocked with donated age-appropriate clothing with the season taken into account.

The goal is for children to get back in school who otherwise may have skipped a day, a week or more, due to a lack of resources.

"Education is the most powerful weapon to break the cycle of poverty," Cockrell said.

Catie's Closet was not expected to grow this big and offer this much when the first one opened at Lowell High in 2010.

"It wasn't many months later that we realized we were giving access to 1,700 kids," Cockrell said. "It was so busy and we realized so many kids were in need that it was shocking."

Other Lowell schools started to reach out to the family, and in 2011, three more schools had a Catie's Closet. In 2012, five more schools were added in Lowell. The Dracut distribution center opened in 2013, serving dozens of schools within the Merrimack Valley, including northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.

Eventually, the family organization received calls asking for them to open in Boston, with the first Catie's Closet opening there in September 2016.

A team dedicated to the Boston-based Catie's Closets began working earlier this month. Cockrell said they are negotiating a lease in Boston, with a second distribution center expected to open by Dec. 1.

The long-term plan is to open three more "command central" stations in Massachusetts, one based in Worcester and one to serve the south in the area of New Bedford and Fall River. The third is expected to serve Springfield, where a pair of Catie's Closets are set to open next month.

"In Western Massachusetts, it doesn't seem there is as many people jumping to help," said Dan Bisson, the program director for Springfield and Catie's brother. "There are a lot of organizations out there helping, but not as much as here. They don't have the money behind it, so we're hoping we can help change that."

Ultimately, the plan is to open the door of Catie's Closet beyond the state, with the first franchise currently planned to develop in Baltimore, Maryland.

With what they say are weekly calls from schools across the nation, Catie's Closet creators are in the process of drafting a franchise for the organization.

"We have taken a few years to create this really proven business model," Cockrell said. "We are doing this in a state that is among the top five in the nation for wealth, and in the top five for least amount of children in poverty, yet we still have 300,000 dealing with prohibitive poverty.

"It seemed unfair to make everyone build this from scratch and much better to share how we do this in a tool kit, where they can instantly brand the concept and instantly open in the school in their states," she added.

The tentative plan includes a buy-in price for Catie's Closet, which will pay for the organization tool kit or help pay for what the organization produces at a bare minimum. The plan also may include an annual fee to help keep marketing current.

"It's hard to hear there's a need," Cockrell said. "It's hard to hear that so many children suffer."

"But there's great satisfaction in knowing that we can make a difference," Trombly added. "You can do something so special with clothes that the community is willing to give and we make a difference in so many people's lives as a result of it. You get an emotional hole by all the kids who are in need, but when you know you can make a change, what better feeling is there than that?"

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Associated Press