There are few occasions in a young person’s school life quite like the end-of-year dance.
The dresses are chosen weeks beforehand, photographs are taken, parents stand proudly at front doors, and boys who ordinarily regard a clean shirt as an unnecessary inconvenience suddenly appear in their smartest clothes.
In Britain, particularly for an older generation, the American-style school prom was once something known chiefly from films and magazines. Our schools might have held dances, socials or an occasional formal ball, but the elaborate American prom—with its dress codes, photographs, cars and carefully observed traditions—belonged to another world.
Yet one incident at Oxford High School in Alabama showed just how seriously such traditions could be taken.
Eighteen senior girls, aged around seventeen or eighteen, were accused of breaking the school’s rules concerning suitable prom dresses. According to the account which prompted considerable discussion at the time, seventeen eventually accepted corporal punishment while one chose suspension instead.
It sounded so extraordinary that some people initially believed the entire affair must have been invented.
In one sense, part of it was.
A spoof version of the story circulated claiming that the girls had been punished during the prom itself while still wearing their offending dresses. That colourful version was not what actually happened.
The girls were allowed to attend the dance. It was only several days later, back at school, that disciplinary action was taken over the alleged breaches of the dress regulations.
Nevertheless, the genuine story was remarkable enough.
Here were young women approaching the end of their school careers being offered a choice between suspension and a punishment that many British readers would associate with a considerably earlier generation.
It naturally raised a question.
How could something regarded as belonging to yesterday’s classroom still be happening to pupils almost old enough to leave school altogether?
And, perhaps more importantly, what did it tell us about the enormous differences between schools, communities and generations?
