Publication Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Students don't consider drinking a big deal
Students don't consider drinking a big deal
(October 27, 2004) Violence at parties rare, but concerns persist
by Alexandria Rocha
About two weeks ago, two Gunn High School students beat a schoolmate unconscious during a party at which all three were heavily drinking alcohol.
The incident is disturbing and frightening. But luckily, it's rare.
Fights between teenagers under the influence of alcohol at weekend parties is uncommon in Palo Alto, according to school administrators and police. While most students say such raucous parties aren't normal, they do say weekend soirees in Palo Alto and neighboring cities at which drinking occurs are frequent.
"It's not a huge thing at Gunn to go get drunk. It's more of a casual social thing," said Gunn senior Nicole Perry, 16.
Tom Jacoubowsky, athletics director at Gunn, provided insight into the current teenage social scene by painting a picture of a typical Saturday night in Palo Alto:
A group of bored high school students hunker down in a Jack in the Box and listlessly await to catch wind of a party -- any call from anybody will work.
A girl's cell phone rings from her purse. The students toss their fries in the trash, plunge into the car and race to so-and-so's friend of a friend's house - with a renewed sense of excitement.
The scene is all too common these days, said Jacoubowsky. One cell phone call about a party can be like a match in a haystack.
"Once the word gets out, you can have hundreds of kids at your house -- kids you don't even know. With cell phones, the word spreads so quickly," he said. "The most common thing is kids having parties when the parents are gone."
And it is likely there will be alcohol there, Jacoubowsky added.
Gunn junior Mark Ustinov, 16, said experimenting with alcohol is "part of growing up." Perry added that drinking is part of the "normal high school experience."
"There's social drinkers and there's people who want to get smashed and drink hard liquor," Ustinov said.
However, Perry and Ustinov said most students go to parties to hang out with friends and drinking is secondary. They said the party where two classmates beat another does not reflect a typical weekend "night out." The victim has recovered, but suffered a broken nose. The two attackers were arrested and each were charged with a felony count of assault with great bodily harm.
"There really is only a select few who go way too overboard. Within our group of friends, everyone takes care of each other really well and no one is allowed to drive if they've been drinking," said Gunn senior Nicole Najafi, 17.
Ralph Castro, the drug and alcohol educator at Stanford University's health center, doesn't see excessive teen drinking as "the norm" either.
He added, however, that "our community and our society is going in the direction of more extreme behavior," such as the stunts contestants do on the television show "Fear Factor."
"With alcohol, I'm seeing people push the limits. Students think they can drink more than they can," Castro said. "They don't realize that 12 shots of alcohol is dangerous. That link isn't being made."
Three students have so far this year been caught under the influence of alcohol at Gunn and Paly dances. This is the second year Gunn has used breathalyzers at the dances to aid in targeting students who have been drinking. Breathalyzers are not used at Paly.
There weren't any students caught intoxicated at the homecoming dances last Saturday.
Police have said that Palo Alto has a high rate of underage drinking because it's considered a "college town." But Lt. Ron Laurence couldn't say whether that's attributed to high school students or college students under the age of 21.
"There are the high school kids that get access to alcohol, we're not naïve enough to think that doesn't exist," said Laurence, who is with the Palo Alto Police Department.
Police have and will continue to conduct undercover sting operations for which minors try to buy alcohol from local liquor stores, Laurence said.
Local law enforcement has also had undercover minors "shoulder tap" adults outside of liquor stores, asking them to buy alcohol. In either case, the clerk who sells or the adult who buys the alcohol could receive citations from police.
To combat whatever teen drinking there may be in Palo Alto, the Community Drug and Alcohol Committee launched a campaign at Gunn and Paly last spring that turns the attention from the students who "take it too far" to those who don't.
The cornerstone of the campaign is a survey in which students were asked about their drug and alcohol experiences, as well as their perceptions about their peers' habits
The survey results, which have since been attacked for being unreliable and incomplete, revealed that 90 percent of high school students do not drink alcohol in a typical week. Posters boasting the statistic soon clung to school walls. Water bottles at field day and candies with ribbons at prom, all promoting the figures, were quickly distributed.
"The whole idea behind it is to focus on the 90 percent of kids that are making healthy choices," said Susan Shultz, a guidance counselor at Paly. "We perceive our kids using and drinking a lot more than they are. Risky behavior in kids is supposedly declining."
According to Child Trends, a national nonprofit research firm, there have been modest declines in teen drinking over the past several years. In 2003, about 30 percent of high school seniors engaged in binge drinking (five or more drinks in a row), compared to about 40 percent in 1991.
The local project, estimated to have cost about $50,000 so far, was largely funded by the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and the PTA.
When the results were released in April, even students seemed skeptical.
"Not a lot of people answered them honestly, but it's not going to change the way people act or the things they do," Ustinov said last week on his way to decorate the junior class homecoming float.
Najafi added, "The money they're spending on trying to get us not to drink is pointless because if you're going to drink, you're going to drink. There's always going to be teenage drinking."
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