Was the dance contract enforced at Senior Ball?

This past weekend, one of the most exciting events of 2012 for Dixon High School took place in Sacramento. On Saturday, February 4, Senior Ball was held for all of the Seniors and their dates. This dance is very similar to Prom, which will take place in April. It is still a very formal dance, but is only for Seniors.

This year was the first year that a new dance contract has been added to DHS. This year, the school officials and teachers decided to create this contract, which states the rules under which the ways that students can dance at a school social. THis contract was issued to hopefully improve the risqué dancing on the dance floor. Was this contract effective at all this year at Senior Ball? I was eager to find out.
When the contract was announced, many students were upset and angry. Dances are a way to get away from all of the hard work and stress that the actual school work has caused. Dances are times to have fun, but some students take fun to a new level. Many of the DHS dances have been known to contain “dirty dancing” and “grinding”. This year, it was time to put that to an end. Every student who was attending Senior Ball was required to stop by the office to sign the contract, which told them what they could and couldn’t do on the dance floor.

Angelia Lara is a Senior at DHS. Lara and her friends attended Senior Ball last weekend, and she said that she had a lot of fun. “Everyone in my group looked great and we had a good time,” she said. “Senior Ball was great with the DJ and music videos playing the songs. And to end the night, we all ate at Denny’s together.” It is obvious that she had a good time with her friends at the dance, but how were the teachers behaving regarding the way that Angelia and her friends were dancing? “The chaperones were not strict. They were even dancing with us,” she said. How could the adults that were opposed to the idea of dirty dancing possibly be dancing with the students and not criticizing them based on their moves? She expected them to be a lot more strict than they really were.

Another Senior that attended was Stephanie Sikes. She also enjoyed the dance, since it allowed the Seniors to see how much they have been through together. She also didn’t think that the teachers were as strict as she thought they would be. “Mr. Barsotti was watching everyone cloesly, but he was more relaxed than at Homecoming,” she said. Sikes thought that the dancing rules were pretty ridiculous, and she said that some students were still going against the contract, but they would just try to not get caught by the teachers.

Mary Dolan was yet another Senior who went to Senior Ball. Like the other two girls, she said that it was “amazing”. “It was way better than Junior Prom for me,” she said. She also thought that the chaperones would be very strict, but surprisingly they weren’t. “I heard them say something to maybe three people the whole night and the dance contract wasn’t enforced super strictly.” She doesn’t expect for the rules to get any more stricter for dances in the future, like Prom this year and Homecoming next year.

Overall, the dance contract seems like it was kind of useless at Senior Ball. Since so many students disobeyed it and the teachers seemed careless, what is the point of even having a contract? Maybe in the future, the administrators of the contract will continue not to enforce it, and let the students dance how they would like.

*Pictures provided by Mary Dolan