These teens are saving the last dance.
While other seniors around the city spent the last two weeks dress shopping and going to tux fittings, three All Hallows High School seniors were focused on saving their class’s very last prom.
The Catholic school’s end-of-the-year gala was nearly canceled because most of the graduating class couldn’t afford the $220 ticket.
But Ethan Amaya didn’t want to see his classmates at the Bronx Catholic school — which sits a long fly ball from Yankee Stadium — fail to experience this rite of passage, so he stepped up to the plate and took a swing at raising the cash to help the dance go on.
And, thanks to rapid organizing, Amaya and his friends were able to lower the costs to a point where the shindig has been saved — and just in time, as the school is slated to be closed next month and this will be the school’s last graduating class.
“This whole year has been very hard for everybody and it’s just very important that we have this. I feel like we should have something special, a night to look back on,” Amaya, 18, told The Post.
“I want all of us to experience prom as a senior class, because we came into the school as a senior class, and I want us to leave the school as a senior class. I want to still be together, spend the night not having a worry.”
Students earlier this month were delivered the heartbreaking news that their prom was likely off because only 30 students had bought prom tickets — which was below the 40-person minimum needed to reserve the venue.
There are 82 students in the senior class.
The news was heartbreaking to the community, which had only learned just a few months earlier that the 115-year-old Catholic school was one of nearly a dozen in the city that would permanently shutter its doors this June, thanks to skyrocketing tuition and plummeting enrollment.
“I was devastated, because I was really happy to be there for my 12th-grade year, but then I realized it was closing … This school has become my family. So it’s heartbreaking,” said Kayla Marie Perez, 18, who had transferred after her previous all-girls school, St. Barnabas, shut down last year.
With his new classmates especially in mind, Amaya turned to his mother, Emilia Corrado, for help brainstorming the prom fundraiser.
It initially aimed to buy at least 10 tickets for students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to buy for themselves, thus meeting the minimum threshold the school needed to put the dance back on.
Perez helped get the word out about the online fundraiser, while fellow St. Barnabus transfer Emily Cueto, 17, had the genius idea of a venue change, as the prom was originally imagined as an expensive yacht excursion.
But Cueto suggested hosting it at Maestro’s Caterers, an iconic Bronx landmark that would host the event at a fraction of the cost — which lowered the cost of each ticket from $220 to $170.
“Why don’t we go to a venue that’s less expensive so they could be able to go, gather all together because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Cueto explained.
The group of quick-witted teens also raised $2,000 in just a few days — which was used to further defray the cost and entice more students to sign up. Now, about 45 kids are going.
The trio is still trying to raise enough money for the entire class to go to prom for free, a feat that would cost upwards of $14,000.
If they can’t raise that cost, they’re going to retroactively give back money to each prom attendee so that the tickets could go as low as $100.
The $170 is a steeper cost than it appears for many of the families at All Hallows, where 57% of families receive some form of public assistance and are already plugging most of their income into the $7,200 per year tuition.
“Our families sacrificed so much to begin with to send them to a Catholic school in New York City, in the borough of the Bronx, that they struggle and this is a huge sacrifice, and it’s something that they’re giving to give their kids the brightest future they could possibly have,” said Principal Nick Corrado.
“It’s not that our parents have this money sitting around. Our parents really struggle to send their sons and their daughters to All Hallows, so to defray the costs through whatever is raised is a huge burden off of these families.”
The school — which has stood in Concourse longer than Yankee Stadium — had suffered years of declining enrollment, which they desperately tried to stave off by bucking its all-male tradition and accepting dozens of female students this year, but it wasn’t enough.
With one week until the prom, Amaya and his friends are optimistic they can give their class the proper send-off.
“We only get one prom. So it would really suck to not see everybody there and like, not have to spend that time with them. It is extremely important to us that we have this night,” said Amaya.
