Anonymous wrote:Pardon my ignorance (I'm new here!), but how do the kids pay for this?
Anonymous wrote:Pardon my ignorance (I'm new here!), but how do the kids pay for this?

Anonymous wrote:I went to Beach week. I was a "good" kid - I didn't drink, didn't stay out late, didn't sneak around. During beach week, I drank, stayed out all night with strange guys we randomly met, had a great time.
Will I let my kid go? Yeah but truthfully I will give her a ton of parental type warnings and then bury my head in the sand and pretend she is not drinking, not staying out late, not meet random guys.
They had a plan:
“None of this drink-drink and pass out right away,” said the kid with the trucker cap askew and the lollipop-stick legs.
“Yeah,” agreed his even lankier sidekick. “So what do we do?”
I was dodging herds of bikini babes and packs of panting young men to keep eavesdropping on the pair.
Lollipop was excited. “Long, sustained drinking. Sustained. We just keep drinking and drinking.” He took a swill of his Cherry Coke.
This was zero hour in a rite of passage for thousands of high school seniors: the month-long bacchanal in Ocean City known as Senior Week. And these two characters were on the ground early, making their plan. And Cherry Coke wasn’t part of it.
Senior Week is a tradition that has been dreaded by Washington area parents for decades. It’s the annual migration of newly graduated, newly liberated, barely legal teens to the shore, where they party, plot, puke, hook up, scheme, swim, roam, dirty dance in foam and — for about 10 percent of them — get locked up for everything from underage drinking to drug possession to assault.
For the kids, it’s a week-long dress rehearsal for college frat parties. For their mothers and fathers, it amounts to a parenting final exam.
“Do I let them go to Beach Week?” is the senior parent anthem sung for months beforehand. On discussion boards, at PTA meetings and swim meets, it’s usually split about 50-50.