Filthy songs, crazy light shows, epic breakdancers and every cool kid in school. Sounds like a good time, right? Well, not if you are a student at Palo Alto High School. For all of you out there who have been to one of our few school dances, you know just what I am talking about. So let me paint you a new picture.
Pretend you are a freshman, (because who else would be näive enough to attend such an event), you show up to the dance with your crew ready to have a good night. It’s your first high school dance and you are feeling a bit nervous about dancing among all the upperclassman and older students. Well good news for you, all those older intimating kids learned long ago not to waste their time and money.

After passing the breathalyzer test you head out to the dance floor only to be met by thirty other kids all with the same bored face as you. Well at least all your friends showed up, right? Wrong. They all heard about the horrors of Paly school dances and went to get ice cream instead. I wonder who got more for their money. Now the only people to dance with are the elected officials of Associated Student Body (ASB), and they are only there because they are forced to. Like a smart person, you head on home hanging your head in shame.

Let’s be honest, this has happened to us all at some point. We have all been through the embarrassment of attending such an event.

So why do we continually let the new freshman go through the same pain we did? It is time to stop the madness. There are two courses of action we can take to do so.

First, and my personal favorite, is to stop wasting the money and put it elsewhere. Second, and more challenging, we need to change the whole way our dances are created, attended, and publicized. The choice is yours, Paly.

If we were to cut the dances out all together, save Prom and homecoming, we would be able to take the money ASB spends and put it elsewhere. Why not buy a cabana for the senior deck, lower the prices for parking tickets or give everyone that free ice cream we were robbed of by attending the dance. But ASB will argue that dances are fun and the attendace rates are not that low. Well ASB, it’s time to give it up. Paly dances are never fun for more than thirty minutes. I will, however, admit that having over three hundred tickets sold at the back-to-school dance on Aug. 23 is quite an impressive feat, but how many of those three hundred stayed for more than thirty minutes?

It’s sad when you realize it’s more fun to go to Gunn. They put way more effort into making the dances enjoyable. I say we just cut the school dances and buy a herd of horses. They are much more useful than Paly dances.

The more moderate of the two actions, making the dances better, seems to be the more favored option by Paly students. But so far this has failed to happen. And if you are wondering why, just ask your fellow student, because that is exactly what I did.

“The only girl to dance with at a Paly dance is Manti Te’o’s girlfriend,” senior Josh Stern said. For those unfamiliar with Manti Te’o, he is a football player who allegedly made up having a girlfriend, or in other words, dating an invisible woman.

Therefore, the best way to fix the school dances is to get people to come. To do this we need to step up our advertising for the dances and really get these things hyped up. The main thing that needs to change, however, is that upperclassmen need to be enticed into going. If the juniors and seniors go, and in large numbers, then going to a dance will become “the cool thing to do”. With more kids at the dance less kids would be out on the street going to parties and getting in trouble. Students of Paly, the choice is yours.