There have been consistently small turnouts at on-campus school dances this year with less than 100 attendees for both Spring Fling and Snowcoming.
“It’s hard to try and get that same dance environment in the Pumadome or the Wellness Center,” senior and ASB Vice President Kori Billingslea said.
UPrep has four dances every school year: homecoming, Snowcoming, Spring Fling, and prom. Homecoming and prom are typically held off-campus, but Snowcoming and Spring Fling happen on campus. This year’s Prom will be held at the Dockside at Duke’s Restaurant.
According to Assistant Director of Upper School Meg Anderson-Johnston, only 75 people went to the school’s Spring Fling in the Pumadome. In comparison, 368 people attended Homecoming this past fall.
Ninth grader Aryana Atreya didn’t go to Spring Fling this year because of the location, the ticket prices and the lack of excitement leading up to the dance.
“Making people pay to go, it being at UPrep, and nobody going, it just didn’t seem like it would be very fun,” Atreya said.
The reason the school holds two dances on campus every year is because of high venue prices.
“Venues used to be $3,000 or $4,000, but they’ve doubled or even tripled in price in the past few years,” Anderson-Johnston said.
A potential alternative to two on-campus dances would be to merge them and host it off-campus.
“We have talked many times about combining the winter and spring dances and having it off campus,” Anderson-Johnston said. “But the desire to have four dances has always won out.”
Billingslea believes that uneven attendance can be fixed through more student involvement, but it still does not mean more people will go to dances on campus.
“We really just have to get more student opinion and try to see what people want,” Billingslea said.
Although UPrep currently has trouble getting students to go to dances, this hasn’t always been the case. Sedona Sanchez (‘94) served as the ASB treasurer her senior year and helped plan dances.
“We had to find the place, we had to get the budget, we had to plan the whole deal, we had to do everything,” Sanchez said.
One thing they did to reduce dance costs and increase attendance was to have combined dances with other schools in the area, specifically for dances that weren’t homecoming or prom, which the school funded.
“Most of the dances we did, besides the two that were paid for by the school, we would join with other schools,” Sanchez said. “We would have joint dances with Bush and Northwest.”
Combining dances with other schools was likely easier when class sizes were smaller; Sanchez’s senior class had 26 students, whereas the 2025 senior class has 90 graduates.
“We are a little large to combine,” Anderson-Johnston said. “But I’m not opposed to it; I’ve never thought about it.”
Junior ASB Representative Paige Johnson agrees that organizing a combined dance with other schools could convince more UPrep students to attend.
“I feel like that would add a layer of newness and a fun element,” Johnson said.
