The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

The official student newspaper of Walter Johnson High School

The Pitch

Point-Counterpoint: Or Leave It

Unsupervised High School Graduates Leads to Recipe for Disaster

For those of you who are planning on attending Beach Week, you might as well put yourself behind bars now because that’s where you’re going to end up before it’s all said and done.


Beach Week, an annual ritual characterized by high school seniors raiding beaches across the East Coast in June, is just an immature excuse for second semester seniors to take their angst out on rented houses and unassuming beach cops. The only people coming out of this debacle looking dumber than the seniors renting overpriced houses at dirty beaches are their parents—the ones who fund the operation.

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In June 2007, The Washington Post reported that a 25-year-old Bethesda Soccer Club coach was charged with 18 counts of endangering the welfare of a child when Dewey Beach police officers smelled illegal substances coming from a house party. So why was the coach at a beach house with a bunch of kids? Because these genius’ parents paid him to chaperone.

“He was denying that there was any use of alcohol in the house,” said Detective Cliff Dempsy in an interview with the Post. “Then two people jumped out of the balcony,” including a woman who broke her ankle, because nothing says collegiate preparedness like innocently jumping out the window of a kegger.

Beach Week proponents argue that the vacation week offers graduates a taste of the freedom that they will be afforded in college by giving them the opportunity to live cooperatively with their friends. But these naïve individuals don’t realize that a senior’s mentality while on Beach Week is completely the opposite of the view of a freshman on a college campus.

Graduating seniors are coming off at least eight weeks of senioritis, (sen-ior-i-tis: a syndrome affecting graduating seniors who know that their grades no longer matter and any laziness they may display can be blamed on senioritis.) These seniors go off to the beach with hopes of freedom and no strings attached, except, of course, their credit card limits.

In contrast, a freshman in college quickly finds that they are on the bottom of the undergraduate totem poll. Senioritis is stripped away and they’re thrust into a world of course credits and rights of passage. They’re not on vacation, and they’re not at some prissy beach.

In reality, there is nothing you can do to keep seniors from acting like idiots the week after they graduate—all you can do is minimize the damage, so when we free the crazy animals out of their high school cage, let’s keep them in their natural habitat.

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