Halloween is big in Wiscasset Elementary School first grade teacher Clara Brown’s family. One of her favorite childhood costumes was Raggedy Ann. Another year, she was a lamb. She said she can still remember how comfortable and smooth the costume felt.

She remembers her mother dressing as a mouse with “full-blown ears.”

Brown’s chihuahua-jack russell mix Toby has been a dinosaur. Last Halloween, he was a bat. “He has these amazing pointy ears, and it just kind of fit.” Also last year, the Georgetown woman, 28, won $50 as a scary clown in a costume contest in Bath.

This Halloween, and for more to come if it’s a success, Brown is going to try to make it easier for families to get costumes for their WES students. She’s planning a costume swap and hoping to also have some to give students without a trade-in. To pull off that part of the plan, she’ll need donated costumes, Brown said in a classroom interview Monday afternoon.

She’ll have a head start, with her own donations. Her mother saved Brown’s childhood Halloween costumes and Brown plans to give them to the effort, which has the support of Principal Mona Schlein and staff.

The school is all for reusing things whenever possible, and supports any way it can find to help families, Schlein said in a separate interview at the school Monday. Brown shared the costume swap idea with the staff last year, Schlein said. “We all thought it was a fabulous idea, and we look forward to helping her.”

“It just makes so much sense to me,” Brown said. The swap could save families the expense of a new costume; help children get costumes they want to wear because they’d be there to pick them out; and if donations come in over the next couple of months, hopefully also help avoid the chance of someone missing out on having a costume, she said.

Brown recalled a WES student getting worried last Halloween, when he didn’t have one yet. “It was the day of Halloween. His friends had been talking about their costumes for weeks.” The boy’s family got him one. But Brown said the uncertainty the student had felt gave her the idea to try a different take on an event she’d helped with years earlier.

When she was studying for her bachelor of science degree in elementary education at East Carolina University in North Carolina, she helped with a prom season, community dress swap for local high school girls.

“If you can do a dress swap, you can do a costume swap,” Brown said.

Drop off donations of costumes in all sizes and in good condition, or even an accessory or a tube of face paint, during school hours, Brown said. Or, if that’s not possible, call the school at 882-7767 or email her at cbrown@wiscassetschools.org to make arrangements, she said.

Even one accessory could help a family make a costume, such as pairing a fake pitchfork with red clothes, Brown said.

“Right now, we’re doing an all-cry for donations. We want people to look in their basements and attics,” she said. The tentative date for the swap is Oct. 27.

“If we can make it so that none of the kids have to have anxiety over something that’s really like a rite of passage for children, then we win,” Brown added about the project.