Sobering Thoughts About Grad Nights : Safety: Liquor-free O.C. parties get more elaborate. Some parents question cost, escalating competition.

It started small in the late 1950s with parents looking for a way to keep euphoric teen-agers off the streets and away from booze on high school graduation night.

Today, the two words “Grad Nite” have become a cultural phenomenon and mini-industry.

Forget low-budget parties with balloons, streamers and punch under gymnasium lights.

Students can now stroll through mock 737 airliner nose cones and slide down into island paradises, complete with magicians, mimes, hypnotists and disc jockeys playing the latest CDs.

To preserve the memories, seniors might make a music video with their chums. Or play a game of laser tag after they’re done trying to knock one another down while wearing silly get-ups that transform them into mock sumo wrestlers. Or race each other through an inflatable obstacle course.

“The idea is to throw the happiest party they’ve ever seen,” said Steve Dekany, a project aide with a nonprofit group that helps parents put on Grad Nites.

The hotbed of Grad Nite extravaganzas is Orange County, where roughly 80% of high school seniors pay up to $50 each to be locked into the bashes with elaborate sets, entertainment, food and price tags that range from $20,000 to nearly $40,000.

More than 50 Orange County high schools will have Grad Nites in June, but parents in such places as blue-collar Downey and affluent San Marino also know how to stage sober celebrations. San Marino has been holding them for four decades and is considered one of the originators.

An estimated quarter of the state’s 800 high schools will put on a Grad Nite this June. The idea has spread to other states and also drawn interest from school officials in Japan, Europe and Canada.

Although the special school parties are only for a night, planning and pulling one off can consume a year of preparation, requiring thousands of hours from volunteer parents who handle everything from fund-raising and food donations to set design and construction.

“Every year, parents just come up with bigger and better things,” said Tom Anthony, an assistant superintendent for the Capistrano Unified School District, host to four Grad Nites this year.

As part of the fun one year in Tustin, an ersatz King Kong’s hand snatched a bunch of bananas from a man dressed as Tarzan. Another year, a 14-foot waterfall cascaded onto a submarine.

At Warren High School in Downey, parents constructed a killer whale with help from their local Rose Float Assn.

Moms and dads are limited only by their imaginations and finances.

“We can convert a campus into Italy,” said Dekany, a project aide with GRADS, a nonprofit group born in Orange County that now provides training, advice and motivational talks to parents who stage Grad Nites.

In warehouses and at high schools, many of this year’s corps of volunteer parents have already started building sets that will transform their teens’ campuses into exotic locales.

Poorer areas, however, don’t see the same buzz of activity. Parents there are often juggling more than one job and have little free time to volunteer. There are also few large businesses to solicit for in-kind donations such as food.

“We’re surrounded by junk yards,” said Michael Perez, an assistant principal at Jordan High School in Watts. “I honestly feel that economically, the majority of our parents could in no way participate in something like that.”

In better neighborhoods, some parents--plumbers, carpenters, doctors, lawyers and architects--have been known to schedule vacation time so they can chip in.

Still, despite such a groundswell of support, staging such as events for the first time can be daunting, said Kathleen Valenti, co-chair of Grad Nite for Aliso Niguel High School in Aliso Viejo. The price tag for Grad Nite there is $30,000, but local merchants haven’t donated at the level that was anticipated.

“It’s a business, yet most of us are not business people,” Valenti said. “Most of us are just parents and some have more expertise than others.”

The downside may be fatigue and worry, but parents say the upside is the satisfaction of knowing that their kids will have a safe send-off from high school.

“Parents do it because they want to make sure their children come home,” said Pete Rodriguez, a Grad Nite volunteer at Santa Teresa High School in San Jose that holds a $12,000 event. “When they do come home, you know that they are OK, and that’s the best feeling in the world.”

But intense efforts to steer teens away from unchaperoned parties can lead to a cycle of trying to outdo the previous year’s bash, experts say.

Anthony said the first Grad Nite at his south Orange County district was in 1989 at Capistrano Valley High School, part of which took on the appearance of a ship with gangplank that students had to cross to enter the party.

The next year, parents at San Clemente and Dana Hills high schools wanted to try their hands.

“They started competing against each other,” Anthony said.

Seniors who would normally scoff at the idea of attending a party organized by their parents are held in suspense until the big night.

“Students hear about what’s happening at other schools,” said Tom Aufdemberg, a Tustin dentist and GRADS board member. “We’re having freshman and sophomores who ask what their theme will be. We’ve had seventh- and eighth-graders ask what’s going to be coming for them. They realize this is not a crepe-paper-and-balloon kind of party.”

Much of the Orange County growth in Grad Nite occurred in the mid to late 1980s.

“There were only about a half-dozen high schools in 1986 who had Grad Nites,” Aufdemberg said. “Now, it’s easier to say how many don’t have them.”

What started as in informal group of concerned Orange County parents in 1986 was transformed in 1993 into a public and private partnership at the Riverside County Office of Education, where GRADS today has offices and receives staff support.

Among its 92 members, GRADS counts schools in Hawaii, Arizona and Utah as well as California. GRADS officials say that a quarter of the 800 high schools in California now hold a Grad Nite event annually.

“You’ll see them from Inyo County and Mono County, in Lone Pine, Blythe and Yuma,” Dekany said. “We’ve only seen it grow.”

Grad Nite is a new arrival in the dusty outpost of Blythe, population 10,000, where parents last year raised about $10,000 to hold the event for seniors at the Mohave Desert town’s only high school.

Organizers spent about $7,500, and all food was donated. The money saved was carried over for this year’s Grad Nite.

Although not as expensive as some Grad Nites, Blythe’s was a hit.

“You’re up all night and nobody is tired--it’s kind of neat,” said Margie Currier, a city building technician and chairwoman of the Grad Nite committee. “The kids don’t know you’re guiding them on how to have fun.”

But many high schools--particularly those in poorer neighborhoods--can’t speak of similar success.

At Jordan High School in Watts, the PTA is hoping to fire up seniors in the Class of 1995 for a nighttime trip to Disneyland. The graduating class the year before didn’t show enough interest so the outing was canceled.

Holding an elaborate Grad Nite on campus would be a difficult task, said Michael Perez, an assistant principal.

“If you look at the crime statistics, we are in a drug area,” Perez said. “And some of our parents have drug problems.”

However, some parents have held small drug- and alcohol-free graduation gatherings at their homes, Perez said. Seniors at Belmont High School near Downtown Los Angeles are also supposed to make a visit to Disneyland. There will be no campus shindig.

Gordon Clanton, a sociology professor at San Diego State University, said parents in poor neighborhoods who lack finances and time to volunteer still feel strongly about schools and usually try to give back in some way even if they can’t provide a home-grown Grad Nite.

“Schools are a natural gathering point,” Clanton said. “It’s about the only thing that we have in common anymore.”

Yet some parents are troubled by the lavishness of the more costly Grad Nites.

“I wish some of that money could be given to a graduate or something could be set up like a grant,” Patty Spooner, a business owner and mother of a son who is senior at Newport Harbor High School. “There’s just something about it that bothers me.”

Some schools in other parts of the state hold joint Grad Nites to save money. Others here and elsewhere recycle props or trade them much like kids trade baseball cards.

Kathy Wallace, who chaired a parent committee last year for University City High School in San Diego, said the Grad Nite theme has stayed the same the past few years.

“We decided not to reinvent the wheel manly because we didn’t have the manpower or the funds,” Wallace said. “Because of the way the economy is, it’s getting more expensive to do it and a lot of parents are going back to work and can’t donate the time.”

Everyone agrees that Grad Nites save lives.

Dekany said that teen-age fatalities rise 20% to 30% during the months surrounding high school graduations, spurring the need for drug- and alcohol-free alternatives to unchaperoned parties.

“The single most dangerous night of a high school student’s life is grad night,” Dekany said. “The students tend to take more risks. There are a lot of parties. And they are not popcorn parties.”

In San Marino last June, two students were shot to death and seven other people were wounded during a private graduation party at a house valued at nearly $1 million. Two young people wielding semiautomatic weapons sprayed gunfire on a crowd of 100 who were charged $2 to get in.

“The cause used to be just to keep the kids off the street, but now they can’t even be assured of safety during a party in a home,” Aufdemberg said. “There can be drive-bys, and during one party at a hotel one year there was a shooting.”

The organized Grad Nite at San Marino High School is among one of the longest running. Others with comparable track records are in Laguna Beach and Placentia.

Valenti said that she is excited about the first Grad Nite for Aliso Niguel High School, where she has two children, including a senior.

Grad Nite will not only mark the start of a tradition, it will mean the end of 20 hours a week of planning to go with her part-time job as a special education aide, Valenti said.

“When it’s over, I’ll probably sleep really good,” she said.