Burlington High School confronts dirty, drunken dancing - Burlington Free Press

Burlington High School senior Theresa Strenio said she has no qualms about blowing into a tube before prom to prove her sobriety.

“It’s going to be five seconds when we’re in the door,” said Strenio, who also serves as student council president. “It definitely does hurt the mood a little bit, but after the Winter Ball, it’s something they have to do to keep parents off their backs and to keep kids safe.”

Administrators began reviewing school procedures after the Holiday Winter Ball in December, during which Burlington police detained 10 students involved in a drinking incident. The students faced three- to five-day suspensions, along with drug and alcohol counseling.

Besides curbing alcohol use, the school has a new interest: nipping the “degrading” trend in dancing.

“The vast majority of our students at our dances are doing everything right,” principal Amy Mellencamp said last week.

Regardless, even sober students can expect to be randomly breath-tested before and during the Spirit Dance in March and the prom in May. In addition to asking Burlington police to test students for alcohol, Mellencamp has charged administrators and chaperones with trying to defuse “dirty” dancing.

“We’ll learn from this,” Mellencamp said. “Hopefully, it’ll go smoothly.”

Dirty dancing

Although the school’s student handbook does not restrict students to the polka or the Lindy hop, it does insist students behave, and by extension dance, with respect “for one’s self and for the worth and dignity of others.”

Despite the rule, Mellencamp said she has observed dancing that demeans students.

“In the whole MTV world, and a lot of the additional, various reality shows on TV, students do not often see other ways to dance except to do what’s often called grinding, or dancing that I think is too sexually explicit,” Mellencamp said. “It’s degrading, especially to girls.”

Grinding involves the rubbing of one’s rump on another’s front.

“It has gotten out of hand,” Strenio said. “A lot of the dancing is degrading to women. It’s kind of unfortunate, and it’s kind of hard to monitor.”

Alcohol might be a cause, “but overall, I think it’s just our society is becoming, you know, more sexual,” Strenio said.

Grinding aside, school dances “are just socially awkward, anyway,” Mellencamp said, adding she wants the events to be comfortable and fun for 18-year-olds, 14-year-olds and chaperones, of all cultural persuasions.

Mixing up the playlist might mix up the dancing, she suggested. In the latest edition of the school newsletter, Mellencamp asked parents to teach their children different dances â€" “I can already hear the conversations at home about that idea!” she wrote. The lights will also be turned up, but if grinding persists, chaperones will have to tap offending couples on the shoulders and tell them their moves are “out of line,” she said.

But, again in the interest of making everything comfortable and fun, administrators will have to respect the line between being attentive and kind of creepy.

It’s not as though students want 100 adults watching them, Mellencamp said.

Senior Hannah Senftleber attested to that.

“A lot of my friends have been talking about how they’re not excited about the prom anymore,” Senftleber said, “but we’ll see what happens.”

Burlington School Board Chairman Fred Lane said he has not chaperoned his two sons, a freshman and a junior, at BHS dances â€" “there’s been no great outcry for Dad to come” â€" but he trusts the administration to make the right calls.

“We’re parents; we’ve seen school dancing,” Lane said. Since Elvis Presley performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” each generation of parents has had that, “Oh, my God, what are they doing now?” moment, he said.

Lane said he had a hard time defining appropriate dances.

“I think that it’s honestly a difficult line to draw,” he said. “You know it when you see it,” he added, invoking former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s attempt to define hard-core pornography in 1964.

Administrators will likely also have trouble curbing behavior ingrained in upperclassmen, student Senftleber said.

“I’m not sure if they’ll be able to stop it now,” Senftleber said. “I feel like all of the upperclassmen have been doing it for three or four years, and trying to change it at their senior prom isn’t going to do much.”

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