[dekeguy]

My Aunt told me that she was in a High School Sorority that was school sanctioned and very carefully monitored by the chapter advisors and the administration and served as a sort of feeder organization to the NPC houses at Newcomb College. Lots of fun but tightly controlled. Apparently there were a dozen or so of these sororities, but that the system was dieing out in the late 50s and was gone by the mid 60s. I asked some cousins down in New Orleans who told me that there used to be an extensive network of High School Fraternities and Sororities which were independent of college Greek organizations but did tend to feed into certain houses in the deep South at least. The Fraternities died out in the fifties and the sororities in the sixties and were replaced in New Orleans by a club called "Valencia" which had tennis courts, a swimming pool, a huge party room and club house facilities like a Country Club but limited to kids in high school! Valencia was a social club that might have been seen as basic training for college and Greek life but I think it was more than that.
One of my friends in Law School said that his mother belonged to a national highschool sorority called Chi Kappa Chi (XKX) when she was growing up in Hammond, Indiana. According to him, this was also tightly controlled by the administration at his Mom's school but that some other chapters or other houses were very much into hazing and serious drinking and this led to a law baning HS greek orgs in Indiana. We asked one of our Law profs who we knew to be Greek and he told us that he was aware of similar HS systems in Richmond and in Baltimore and that his father had been in a HS fraternity in St Louis before he went SAE at Missouri. He said that he was pretty sure they all died out about the same time as well. Sounds like in Louisiana they came up with an alternative social organization and in Indiana they shut them down by law. I don't know what happened elsewhere . This is all second hand info but I think its interesting that there was a whole HS level of National Greek Orgs that seem to have died out or gone into deep cover. Anybody know any info about this they can share?