DISTRICT GETS TOUGHER ON DRUG, ALCOHOL USE AT DANCES

BUSTED: First-Time Offenders Are Suspended For 10 Days.

Alcohol is as braided into high school dance culture as prom queens and
crepe paper.

While skimpy clothing and provocative dancing are relatively new problems,
Anchorage School District officials say students using drugs and alcohol
before and during school dances is a constant issue. And they are getting
more aggressive about stopping it.

Many of the municipality's principals, teachers and parents who chaperone
dances have an alcohol-related story they would rather forget: The time the
drunk student vomited in the vice principal's office or when teens arrived
via rental bus, assuming drinking was OK if they weren't driving.

Some schools mandate car searches. At others, kids line up to empty their
pockets, purses and wallets. And one by one, they exhale as chaperones
smell their breath.

But no combination of precautions is fail-safe. And not every kind of
liquor or drug has a distinct smell, said Colette Marshall, activities vice
principal at West High School, where there were 12 alcohol- related
suspensions at the year's first dance.

"Beer is always going to be popular," Marshall said. "But the kids who do
drink now, the big thing is these flavored rums and they chase it with a
handful of Altoids."

Drugs such as ecstasy -- odorless, inexpensive and potentially deadly --
are more prevalent. Marshall suspects kids have shown up at West dances on
ecstasy, a pill that floods the brain with serotonin and induces euphoria.
Unlike the rank remnants of liquor, you can't smell a pill on someone's
breath, Marshall said.

"How do you assess that?" Marshall said. "You can ask, but if she says no,
what can you do? That's a real problem."

If students get caught at dances with drugs or alcohol, the penalty is the
same as if they were caught during school hours. A dance is often the place
kids show up after hours of partying on their own, said Jim Taylor,
Anchorage School District secondary education supervisor.

"If you're looking for a wholesale bust on alcohol use, you just show up at
the dance," Taylor said. "I've been at dances where I found a dashboard of
limes chewed up and you look down on the seat, and there's a tequila bottle."

According to the district policy, first-offenders are handed an automatic
10-day suspension. But at some schools, including West High, students can
reduce that to five days by agreeing to an optional class -- a sort of
alcohol 101 -- attended twice a week for five weeks.

The student's parent must attend four adult sessions. And if the kid comes
to any more dances that year, the parent must chaperone, too.

Other schools wield a stricter approach. At East High, kids caught
violating drug or alcohol policy at a dance can't come to another dance
that year.

"I know there are kids that do stuff we don't catch," Taylor said. "I
absolutely know that, but we do our very best to make sure our kids are
safe out there. If there's nothing else about this, there's that. We can't
have kids running around out there who have been drinking or smoking dope."