St. Mary’s students stirred over prom rules

LYNN – For most high school students the senior prom is a night they have been looking forward to for months, the end to the stress of searching for colleges and taking final exams and a chance to spend the night with friends reminiscing about the past four years.At St. Mary’s High School, more than 300 junior and senior students will don tuxedos and gowns tonight, but not all of the attendees are happy about some new rules instituted by the school this year.In an unprecedented move, St. Mary’s has established a prom schedule that eliminates all private transportation to and from the event and forces any student who buys tickets to attend the school’s sanctioned after-prom until at least 2 a.m.The format was created by administrators and the school’s parent partnership council as a way to keep kids safe and put parents’ minds at ease on prom night, but students say making transportation and attendance at the after-prom mandatory is going too far.School leaders asked the parent partnership, which contains parents of students in all grades, to try and come up with some ideas for prom season early in the school year. What the group decided, and the school ultimately supported, was an all-inclusive prom-after party package.For $55 students will receive a ride to the Danversport Yacht Club in a coach bus for the dance, followed by another chartered trip to the Bostonville Grill on Route 1 for an after party featuring unlimited food and entertainment until 5 a.m.The catch is that in order to attend the prom, students must take the buses and must attend at least a portion of the after-prom, and are only authorized to leave if a parent arrives to pick them up after 2 a.m.”It is a completely safe prom and prom night,” said parent partnership member Chris Reddy, whose daughter is a sophomore at the school. “No kids will be driving at any point that night.”Reddy’s sister, Sue, who has a daughter in the senior class and is also a member of the parent partnership, says prom season is a nerve wracking time for a lot of reasons, but knowing where her child is after the dance is a huge weight off of her shoulders.”She wasn’t too pleased (with the rules) and she was even less pleased when she found out I was going to be involved,” she said. “But it is a huge concern with everything you have to do. These kids spend outrageous amounts of money on a limo and that gets them there, but when the prom itself is over that is a different story.””Even the best teens are prone to making bad teenage decisions that night,” added Dean of Students Michelle Durgin. “And the ultimate thing, especially right now, is that for $55 you get 12 hours of entertainment, transportation and unlimited food at the Bostonville Grill after.”While students understand where the school is coming from in regards to safety concerns, many members of the senior class are still upset about the decision, in part they say, because they were never consulted about the changes.”The intentions are good, but they way they went about it was all wrong,” said Joe Gill, a senior and vice president of the senior student council. “We understand that they are looking after our safety, but they also said they were going to meet with us before any decision was made and they didn’t. They should have had students involved from the beginning. A lot of those parents on the partnership have kids in ninth or tenth grade, who aren’t even attending the prom.”Aside from having a problem with making the after-prom and transportation mandatory, students are also upset about the location of the after-party and the notion that students are required to spend the night with their entire senior class in one place.”I just think they are slighting a lot of students. It was a good idea with bad execution,” said senior Derek Vecchia, who said that students were surveyed on what type of entertainment would take place at the after-prom. “One of the activities they have is watching a movie. I don’t want to cuddle up wit