It was suggested that perhaps $1,000 a couple for prom night is a bit too much. : At the Hop

High school students in the San Fernando Valley are not known for their willingness to tackle social issues, a condition of lethargy possibly due to the prolonged effect of the sun’s rays on their bare heads.

Presidential campaigns hardly interest them at all and the possibility of nuclear war concerns them only to the extent of the damage it might do to either the shopping malls or the paint on their mini-trucks.

Then why, you might wonder, do they all seem in such a high state of agitation? Are their earrings too heavy? Are their ghetto blasters broken? Is their pizza too salty? Close, but no cigar. Their proms are in jeopardy.

For those unaware of the Issue of the Decade among the age group that places restraint in the same wretched category as pimples, L.A. school board member Roberta Weintraub has suggested that perhaps $1,000 a couple for a senior prom and its attendant “necessities” is a bit too much.

The figure is the result of a study by the district’s Senior High Schools Division that found dance tickets alone selling for from $70 to $110 a couple to cover the cost of a band and a hotel ballroom. Then there are the flowers, pictures, limos, tuxes, dresses, hairdos, manicures, pedicures, parties and trips to places like Palm Springs and Santa Catalina Island.

“It’s gotten totally out of hand,” Weintraub said the other day. “The kids are trying to outdo each other. Some are arriving in helicopters. If we were on the beach, they’d be coming in tugboats.”

She has asked, therefore, that student committees be established to consider ways of reducing the cost of the Big Senior Night, including alternatives to the off-campus dance.

This has been interpreted by many teen-agers as comprising an assault on the very core of their existence. It is especially threatening to those who have spent their entire lives waiting for the bacchanalian delight that has come to symbolize emancipation from the constraints of secondary education.

Some kids will go on to college, of course, but only those who aspire to wealth and power. The others will be truckers and cowboys.

When I telephoned Weintraub to ask if it were true that she is attempting to destroy a tradition as dear to the hearts of high school seniors as Guess jeans and designer condoms, she gasped.

“For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t say that! I’m just trying to get some dialogue started, some citywide debate. We could ban the prom, but that isn’t our purpose. We’re looking for alternatives.”

Weintraub added that it isn’t just the excesses of high school proms that worry her but also a tendency by junior high school students to emulate the worst traits of their elders. She hopes the board will also take a hard look at proms on that level to determine if the empty little dears are similarly engaged in pubescent one-upmanship.

Well, sir.

Not since Coke and Fritos were banned from the campus has anything seemed so threatening to the social well-being of the Valley’s high school students. Their telephonic assault on anyone willing to listen makes the Milagro Beanfield War seem mild by comparison. I mean, these kids are serious.

I paid scant attention to the travails of those rising to protest what is already becoming known as the “Prom Bomb” until I too began receiving telephone calls.

One male student named Randy shouted that the school board didn’t have any authority . . . I mean no authority . . . to deprive them of their right to have fun. He felt it had something to do with guarantees specified under the First Amendment to the Constitution.

I suggested it wasn’t his right to assemble that was at issue but the wisdom of pricing school proms out of the reach of all those other kids with similar rights. Randy responded with an epithet that included just about anyone with the temerity to question an activity he felt ought to be removed from the purview of non-participating adults in the first place. Then he hung up.

My high school prom was held in a gymnasium decorated with streamers, but I will not lobby here to limit the crapulence of prom night among those already planning to charter a 747 or to rent the entire island of Maui for their rites of passage in ’89. Their parties will end soon enough, as all parties do.

Young people will always test the limits of restraint as, I suppose, young people should. One wonders, however, whatever became of the guiding spirits who are supposed to define those limits, having once tested the borders of good taste themselves?

After learning from the school district survey what the kids are paying for their proms, I think I have an answer. Kids don’t pay without parental support and mom and dad aren’t limiting anything because it’s the parents themselves who, still trapped in a time warp of their own adolescence, are competing at the prom.

And in this area of wretched excess, that may be the saddest knowledge of all.