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Some High Schools Cancel Dances Over Concerns About Alcohol Use

Some High Schools Cancel Dances Over Concerns About Alcohol Use

Administrators also worry about potential liability and growth of binge-drinking among young people

 

Wall Street Journal

By Jennifer Levitz

October 2, 2016

Students returning to Walpole High School ready for the pep rally and football games also got some surprising back-to-class news: The school had canceled most dances because some students were showing up drunk or hiding tiny bottles of alcohol.

 

There have been teens “falling around the dance floor being held up by their peers; students throwing up in the bathroom” and “dancing in ways that shock the teachers,” Stephen Imbusch, principal of Walpole High, in a Boston suburb, wrote in a Sept. 16 email to parents.

 

“I will not expose your children or my staff to this kind of behavior anymore,” he wrote.

 

A number of other schools are also turning on the lights and killing the music amid growing concern about drinking and drug use. Administrators also worry about potential liability. And some say parents are complicit.

 

In Newport Beach, Calif., Corona del Mar High School recently nixed its October homecoming dance and pep rally after reports of rowdy intoxicated students at a sporting event. “The Friday night football stadium became a metaphor for the pervasive and strongly avoided topics of parental enablement and teenage alcohol consumption,” the school’s assistant principal wrote in a Sept. 23 commentary in the Los Angeles Times, explaining the controversial decision.

 

“I think that obviously doesn’t fit the whole community,” said Shannon Eusey, a Corona del Mar High parent, of that line of criticism. “Does it fit some parents? Yes.”

 

Ms. Eusey, who is also president of the school’s booster club, said in a separate email that the incident was unfortunate but “an incredible opportunity for the students, parents, administration and community to learn and come together to face a national (not local) crisis of excessive alcohol use in teens.”

 

The percentage of high-schoolers drinking is down over the past 10 or 15 years but binge-drinking among young people is a growing concern, said Dr. George F. Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a division of the National Institutes of Health that leads the nation’s research efforts on alcohol use disorders.

 

“There is this cultural phenomenon we’ve been seeing where it’s ‘drink to blackout,’” he said. “These are some of the things schools are having to deal with.”

 

Rather than halt dances, many schools are bringing in more chaperones or organizing sober events before and after dances, said Nichole Dawsey, the director of prevention education for an affiliate of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, an advocacy group.

 

Others are deciding dances aren’t worth the headaches. “We’re not in the dance business, we’re in the education business,” said Ken Kunin, superintendent of the South Portland School Department. That Maine district this September sharply cut dances at the high school, saying a big chunk of drinking and marijuana violations at the school were happening at the events.

 

Meanwhile, sexually provocative dancing, rather than drunken adolescents, led Exeter High School in New Hampshire to last fall indefinitely cancel the homecoming and winter dances, while keeping the prom. That decision stands, said Principal James Tremblay. “I’m not being prudish, but whole groups of students would get in the middle of the dance floor and it would become a mosh, grinding mentality, and it was just not appropriate,” he said. Among locals, the move evoked references to the 1984 Kevin Bacon classic film “Footloose,” about a small town that banned dancing.

 

Mr. Imbusch, Walpole High’s principal, is keeping prom, which is held off-campus, but has halted the fall and winter dances that can bring hundreds to the school cafeteria. He said he made the decision in the spring but​ that it came to light for many people at the start of this school year.

 

The situation “really stinks,” said Nathaniel Kelley, the senior-class president. The 18-year-old sympathizes with the principal’s predicament, but believes students overall are well-behaved at dances.

 

Some critics argue that kids who want to drink will drink, dance or no dance, Mr. Imbusch said. “Well if there is no dance, they are on your watch,” he wrote in his email to parents. “I find this excuse to be such an avoidance of the real problem.”