Rebel Opinion: Breathalyzer Policy at Dances Needs to Change

 Since the drinking incident at Sadie’s last year, at each school dance Mr. McCarthy and other administrators now make each attendee pick a chip out of a bag without looking.  Choosing a chip is like playing poker: you don’t know what you’re going to get until you look at your hand.

With the school’s dance policy, there are three different chips to choose from.  The white chip means you’re okay to enter the dance with no trouble at all, the blue chip means you get a refund on your dance ticket, yet, if by chance you pick the red chip, you are taken into another room to take a breathalyzer test.

Choosing chips does not seem to be a big deal to many but gambling with how your night could turn out is.  Many of us are lucky to get the white chips, yet the unlucky few who pick the red ones end up wasting more than a half hour of valuable dance time proving their sobriety. 

Picking chips at random is not how the school should be running its dances.  As an alternative to random breathalyzer tests, Mr. McCarthy, or another administrator, should greet each student at the door so he is able to judge whether or not that student should be tested.  If a student appears to be under the influence of alcohol then test the student. 

Testing students who are not under the influence of alcohol because they happened to pick the wrong colored chip is careless and a waste of time.  Meanwhile those students who are truly endangering themselves are slipping past administrators.  In addition, the police officers who are there all night need to be paid for their time administering breathalyzer tests to students who turn out to be sober.  Everything costs money and our school is using its money carelessly when it comes to student dances.

Perhaps at the next dance Mr. McCarthy and his administrators can change it up a bit and use a more effective way of going about deterring students from attending dances intoxicated. A new policy may also save money by eliminating many unnecessary breathalyzer tests.