For the past few years, Santa Barbara High School has hosted the Winter Formal in February. This year, they’ve decided to change the dance to Spring Dance. The dance would fall on Saturday, March 21. On Wednesday, March 18, the Associated Student Body (ASB) announced that the Spring Dance was cancelled.
“I was really excited to go, my friends and I had bought our tickets a few days ago and had plans to get ready and go to the dance together. We were pretty bummed out that it got cancelled,” said junior Gigi Yoshimi.
Spring court nominee, Belle Olivera said, “Since I was nominated, I was so happy and excited to go to the dance. I had never been to any winter formal dance before because my dance show always falls on that weekend. I was pretty sad that in my four years at SBHS, I never got to attend a dance besides homecoming.”
The question inevitably came up with students at SBHS: why was the dance cancelled? An anonymous source from ASB says, “Unfortunately, the dance got cancelled due to low ticket sales. By the Tuesday before the dance, we had very low sales. When we announced we would extend the sale until Wednesday, we sold a better amount. ASB as a whole decided to cancel the dance because it didn’t make sense to send so much money for less than 200 students out of 2,000.”
ASB Advisor, Laura Wooster Dorfman, says, “there are two main reasons to cancel. One would be that we would’ve lost a lot of money if we paid for everything for the dance without ticket sales. The other reason is events aren’t as fun without a ton of people. It’s hard because last year’s Winter Formal felt small, but there were still a few hundred people. This year, our ticket sales had only reached about 20%, it wouldn’t have felt as enjoyable. I don’t think we could’ve done anything more in terms of promotion; we made TikToks, posted on Instagram, and ParentSquare. It was just a matter of people not complying.”
