At the next dance, Gunn will run a play from Palo Alto High School’s playbook. All students entering the Homecoming Dance will be tested by a breathalyzer. Based on the steps taken by the administration, it is clear that they believe Gunn students have a problem with drinking. However, instead of hastily enacting an expensive, lengthy process and breaching innocent students’ privacy, the school should focus on crafting harsher punishments for those who are caught and work to combat student drinking overall.

The Homecoming dance, by far the most popular of the year, regularly fills up the gym. Lines to get in wrap around the building, and can include up to 45 minutes of waiting time. With the new breathalyzing plan, students could expect to stand in line for an hour or more, meaning less time for dancing and enjoying the event. With such a long wait, it would hardly be worth attending at all. The administration is allocating over $2,500 to test every student that enters the dance, yet only a small fraction of Gunn students drink. According to the Social Norm survey conducted in 2006, 90 percent of students do not drink alcohol in excess on a monthly basis.

Despite a mostly sober student body, the misdeeds of a few students have precipitated harsh actions on all by the administration. Out of hundreds of dancegoers, only four were deemed to be under the influence and punished. Should everyone be punished for a few students’ behaviors?

Surely a single dance could not cause such a strict new policy. After all, Gunn has five dances a year, including Prom for juniors and seniors. At last year’s Prom, the school reported zero drinking problems; yet, after one dance this year, every student will be thoroughly screened. The correlation is not clear.

If the administration truly believes the student body is suffering from a drinking culture and lifestyle, why isn’t that a larger focus of the school’s agenda? This cannot be the only plan to combat drinking.

Under the new plan, it is likely that the small number of students who do drink will drink elsewhere and those that do not will be insulted by the distrust of the administration. Installing breathalyzers has negative effects on social pressures for drinking as well. If the school is screening everyone, it will be all the more attractive to skip the dance altogether to drink. It is impossible to stop all drinking, and using breathalyzers will not decrease the amount of students who drink on a regular basis. To fight our “drinking problem,” a new plan is needed. Instead of upping technology and pervasiveness, punishments for those caught should be increased in severity. In addition, announcements and assemblies should serve as a constant reminder that coming to dances under the influence is not acceptable.

Like President George Washington’s suppressing of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791, the administration is clearly attempting to kill a mosquito with a machine gun. The plan was hastily prepared as an alternative to negotiating a strategy with the Student Executive Council, and no student input was considered. If the plan stands, the students are at least owed an explanation as to why the administration believes that using breathalyzers is the very best plan to get students not to drink.