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Call off the limo; prom's canceled
`Booze cruises' and wretched excess doom rite of passage at one fed-up high school
By Julia C. Mead
New York Times News Service
Published October 17, 2005
UNIONDALE, N.Y. -- October is the time for homecoming and Halloween parties, but the 489 seniors at Kellenberg Memorial High School already are focused on their prom--the one they are not going to have.
Fed up with the revealing evening gowns, flashy tuxedos, stretch limos, alcohol, drugs, sex and rowdy house parties that are an increasingly common part of the dinner-dance scene across Long Island, Kellenberg administrators canceled the prom this year as a way to end its excesses.
"We watched a pattern develop," said Brother Kenneth Hoagland, the principal of Kellenberg, a Roman Catholic school. "Twenty years ago, seniors went to the beach after the prom and then to someone's house for breakfast. From that, it's turned into a weekend-long orgy that every year has become incrementally more excessive."
The school sent parents a letter in March, before the last prom, outlining objections.
Calling prom "an exaggerated rite of passage that verges on decadence," the letter signed by 11 administrators said spending up to $1,000 on formal wear, limos and after-parties was wasteful. It contended a "booze cruise" and the rented party houses were opportunities for illegal drinking and sex. And it said the school, fearing legal liability, could no longer be responsible for what might happen.
No one listens
The warnings fell on deaf ears, Hoagland said.
Last spring's prom was replete with all the extravagances of previous years, so he and the school president, Rev. Philip Eichner, announced last month that they had no choice but to cancel the 2006 prom. The prom, they wrote, "is so much beyond our control that it is mere tokenism to put our name on it."
Officials from the 10 other Catholic schools in Long Island's Nassau and Suffolk Counties said they, too, worried about the bacchanalia and had become more vigilant about warning parents that they risk arrest by permitting underage drinking. But no other school has canceled the prom.
Sister Jeanne Marie Ross, principal of Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls school in Hempstead, N.Y., said that last year she began talking to parents every chance she got, persuading one set of parents to chaperon their child's postprom celebration at a Hamptons summer house.
"If these parents didn't rent the houses, the kids couldn't go there," Ross said.
Kevin McBride, principal of St. Mary's High School in Manhasset, N.Y., said he continued to warn parents of the potential dangers but would not cancel the prom without at least trying to get parents' attention one more time.
"All schools are doing soul-searching concerning the proms," he said. "There's considerable pressure on the kids because the prom looms large in their imagination, and parents want leverage over their own kids, so we hope a letter from the school will help them say "no" to all the excess."
Kellenberg officials said the time had come for more drastic measures. They called the problem a Long Island-wide phenomenon, involving not just Catholic but also public schools, worsened by some parents' willingness to bankroll the extravaganza.
"We felt that what the prom had become went against the moral and spiritual lessons we were trying to teach their children," Hoagland said.
He said he worried most about parents who play host to cocktail parties before prom and keg parties afterward, or pay thousands of dollars to rent a house in the Hamptons where unchaperoned teens hold raucous parties.
Those notorious prom houses so angered neighbors and local officials that the Southampton Town Police Department sent a letter to every high school on Long Island last year, warning that it was shutting down parties and arresting anyone who had broken a law.
Seniors offer alternative
Three Kellenberg seniors are hoping they can save at least a vestige of the celebration. They banded together to lobby for an alternative event that is more staid and better chaperoned. School officials said they were open to ideas.
The three seniors--Stephanie Lupo, 17, a member of the National Honor Society and the school chorus; Alessandro DeBellegarde, 17, one of last year's New York state martial arts champions, and Melissa Boo, 16, a Girl Scout who plays three musical instruments--said they felt strongly that their classmates should share a celebration.
Their tentative idea is for a carnival-like field day and barbecue, followed by a semiformal dinner-dance in the school on the night before graduation.
As Kellenberg's graduation day begins with an early mass, students may be less prone to all-night revelry, they said. Restricting the event to Kellenberg students may discourage the hormonally charged atmosphere, they added.
"It's not a date event," Boo said.
DeBellegarde said their approach might not stop all excessive behavior.
But, Boo said, "we're thinking if we don't have a fancy, limo-escorted, blown-out occasion, then it won't get out of hand."
Hoagland said administrators still believed that the annual senior trip, a weekend junket to Disney World in Florida, was enough of a seniors-only farewell celebration, but were willing to consider the idea.
"We don't want to encourage them to spend excessively, and they know they can't just mimic a prom," he said."
That ignorant parent quoted in the first story would most likely be the first in line to sue if anything happened to their child.
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