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“Why do our girls have to have themselves so exposed? Why do they have to have cleavage displayed so overtly and slits high up their thighs and then allow boys to dance right up against them? “I am not going to allow this to continue to happen. If there is going to be another dance, then you as parents and your children will have to sit down with me to make some huge changes because I cannot and will not have what my staff and I had to deal with today.”

That was an e-mail from Mr. Charles Salter, a popular high school principal in the wealthy enclave of Aliso Viejo in California’s so-called “O.C.” (Orange County), to parents and teachers. Charles Salter has banned all dances until the kids clean up their act, and now parents and schools from California to Connecticut are cheering, abcnews reported.

The principal had been monitoring school dances for several years and had expressed his concerns to parents about the sexual nature of the dancing. There were dance chaperones and lots of conversation about what was allowed and forbidden. But even at the school’s Winter Formal last January it was impossible to keep the atmosphere below fever pitch inside the dark cavernous hall, pulsating with strobe lights and about 1,200 teenagers. All across the floor girls thrust their rears into their partner’s pelvis to the beat of Missy Elliot’s “Let Me Work It.”
Young couples were grinding away like gears to the pulse of Sisqo’s “How Many Licks.”

But, after a jungle-themed dance in September, Principal Charles Salter canceled all future dances until students, parents and administrators craft a plan to stop freak dancing.
“I saw a girl, she was about 14 or 15 years old,” Salter says. “She was bent over, dancing with a young man who must have been a junior and he was gyrating and thrusting on top of her.”

The 14-year-old attended the “Jungle Dance” this fall that proved to be the last straw for Salter. “I closed the dance down early,” Salter says. ” I came into my office, it must have been about midnight, and I knew I had to address this.”
“It’s basically when two people are like grinding against each other in a kind of sexual way,” Aliso Niguel freshman Kori Roberts says.

Teenagers call it “freaking,” a style of dance made popular on MTV. Educators call it “simulated sex” that has no place at school dances. This clash between outraged adults and sexualized teens is being played out at homecoming dances, winter formals and proms across the nation, most recently at Aliso Niguel High School in Aliso Viejo. Basically, “Freak dancing” or “freakin‘,” is an intimate hip-hop dance style between a boy and a girl, or two girls.

According to latimes, several California schools have adopted detailed dance policies and kick out students who repeatedly cross the line:

This year, Montgomery High School students in Santa Rosa received this notice: “Dancing styles that involve intimate touching of the breasts, buttocks or genitals or that simulate sexual activity are not allowed; when dancing back to front, all dancers must remain upright — no sexual squatting or sexual bending is allowed, i.e. no hands on knees and no hands on the dance floor with your buttocks facing or touching your dance partner.”

At Los Alamitos High, chaperons wear T-shirts that say “No Freaking” and feature two stick figures dancing close with a red slash through them. Beginning with this month’s homecoming dance, Godfrey plans to limit ticket sales, increase lighting and pay more teachers to chaperon. He also plans to turn the lights on every hour to break up the dancing.
The moves were, in part, prompted by a Los Alamitos back-to-school dance last month at which a shirtless boy approached a girl on the dance floor and starting freaking behind her. She stopped him, but felt so uncomfortable that she called her mother, who called police.

At Los Angeles Unified’s Birmingham High School, Principal Marsha Coates said she grew so disgusted by freaking at a homecoming dance two years ago that she threatened to end school dances. “It was lewd. Kids were pressing on the walls and piling on the floor,” Coates said.

Just this month, Principal Patricia Law canceled all school dances at Windsor High School north of Santa Rosa for the rest of the year after a homecoming dance where three-quarters of the nearly 800 students in attendance were freak dancing. She said students can win back their dances if they come up with a plan to keep their moves clean.
“It was time for a wake-up call,” Law said.

Back to Aliso Niguel High School, more than 700 parents attended a forum to address the issue, where Salter described freaking as “simulated sex.” Several parents showed support for his decision. Others expressed hope that an agreement could be reached to curb the freaking and keep the dances. Principal Charles Salter canceled all school dances for the year after witnessing several students freak dancing, in which partners grind and gyrate against each other. Several students violated dress code and arrived drunk at a September back-to-school soiree, Salter said

The controversy landed the school in the middle of a national debate over the generational question about what’s acceptable teenage behavior. A battle that’s been waged for generations, this one caught students by surprise when Salter stuck by his decision to cancel homecoming. Until a defined set of guidelines is in place, principal Salter is standing firm: “There will be no more freak dancing at Aliso Niguel!”

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Education, Gossip, Lifestyle, Sexual Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.