Look At It Our Way is the unsigned editorial which represents the view of the editorial board.

Senior week is a week, typically in June, when a group of recent high school graduates rent a house, apartment, or condo together in a beach town. The week is a final hoorah, a celebration of the past and the future to come.

According to the Washington Post, “Senior Week is a tradition that has been dreaded by…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.

“Senior week is the final and climactic expulsion of all repressed high school inhibitions,” Senior Evan Reinhart said.

It’s something that’s been practiced for decades, taking your summer before college and filling it with: a lifetime of memories, friends, the beach, traveling the country, and maybe even other countries. But now it’s becoming less of a celebration, and more of a disgrace.

At what point have we gone too far? Where do we draw the line? As kids, as parents, as teachers, and as a society, how far are we supposed to let this go until it’s too late? It seems less like senior week is for having a good time, and more like an encouragement to abuse drugs and alcohol as much as possible for a week straight.

It’s not a new thing for high school students to participate in underage drinking or drug abuse. According to a study by the University of Michigan in 2012, 36.4 percent of high school seniors reported use of marijuana and 28.1 percent reported use of alcohol. Synthetic marijuana was reportedly used by 11.3 percent of seniors.

Many parents know what senior week is, they know what goes on, yet they don’t do anything to stop it. They pay for their children to go, they give them money to buy ‘food,’ they encourage them to have a good time and take advantage of being young.

When graduation was originally set for June 19, there was uproar among the senior class because that date was right in the middle of the week most seniors had already booked a house. Due to the numerous complaints from students and their parents, the district moved graduation a week earlier, which will cause them to forfeit $20,000 in state funding. It seems as if even the district administration is encouraging the illegal activities that go on during senior week.

But there’s a pretty clear difference between taking advantage of your youth and abusing it.

Kids grow up learning from society that partying, drugs, and alcohol are all cool. We have to stop and think about what we’re putting into our bodies and realizing how bad it is for us, especially at the high levels consumed during a time like senior week.

Why is it that people need drugs and alcohol to have a good time? Is that the message we want to be sending to other people, that we don’t like to have fun unless we’re in an altered state of mind?

Senior week isn’t a bad thing. Having fun isn’t a bad thing. Not thinking and damaging your body is. Repeated and constant drug use is a bad thing. It’s time to stop and think about your actions and the consequences they will have later on.