High school is a stressful time for students, but events like prom and banquets are the kind of stress relievers they need to get their minds off of finals and big tests. However, because of various factors such as inflation, the price of food, and the costs of renting a venue and booking entertainment, these events are more expensive than they were years ago.

Mid-Pacific aims to give its students the most memorable time they can offer. However, many students feel the events have become too expensive and are increasingly not worth the money and time.

According to freshman class advisor Bob McIntosh, the price of events is often impacted by the number of attendees.

“The more students that attend, [the] better, because often we can negotiate a better cost if we have more people. For this year’s freshman banquet, it cost $85 for tickets because we took the total cost of the event and divided it by the amount of students that will be attending,” McIntosh said.

Sophomore Class Advisor Michele Miyamoto, having past experience in planning student socials, has a unique perspective on the advisor’s side of these events and how they manage factors like the price of tickets.

“Our sophomore banquet is our only event for this year, but we are very much aware of the price inflation. Some ways we try to prevent raising the price is to choose venues that are more affordable or less costly, and we put a limit on party decoration and favor costs as much as possible. The school does not make any profit from what we charge for these events. We need to balance out the special features and money so that it doesn’t affect the school budget, but mainly so that the students will have a memorable time,” Miyamoto said.

Sarah Vasconcellos, class advisor for the class of 2026, finds that planning for large-scale events is complicated due to various factors, including Mid-Pacific’s location.

“For our school events, it has everything to do with the fact that we live on a small little island and everything is already more expensive. For schools, a lot of the event facilities that we use are trying very hard to reduce prices for us but they also have to meet their minimum in order to continue functioning… especially for larger parties like prom, which has around 400 individuals. There’s not a lot of big spaces that will host a party for that long. What I try to do [to help keep costs down] is make all of our decorations or use past decorations,” Vasconcellos said.

With prom coming up for Mid-Pacific’s juniors and seniors, many students are buzzing about the opportunity to attend a classic high school event. Vasconcellos and her prom committee are dedicated to the planning process, organizing each piece to ensure it’s extravagant for everyone that goes.

In addition to the seniors and juniors sharing prom together, the seniors have their own event. Senior Class Advisor Kerry Wheeler has been involved with planning the senior’s events for an extended period of time, but each year is becoming more difficult to plan due to inflation.

“In order to prevent the increase of cost, we seek out venues that are more reasonably priced. We recently had our winter ball. We charged $100 for each student and 81% of the senior class attended, which is a very good percentage for these types of events. Compared to last year’s Winter Ball, the tickets, DJ, catering and venue cost around the same as this year. We can only expect the price to increase versus decrease,” Wheeler said.

It is clear that the class advisors do a lot for Mid-Pacific’s students. The planning of events like banquets and prom is a delicate balancing act between the maximum amount of enjoyment and staying within budget. Students can help to streamline this process by doing simple things such as meeting deadlines for tickets. This allows advisors to have a total headcount of the students attending, preparing appropriately for these events.

With advisors’ intentions to get the best value for students’ money as they possibly can, students need to understand the trade-offs that are made to keep events reasonably priced for everyone. It would be fantastic to have memorable parties at great venues “with special features like a good DJ, lighting, and photo booths and decorations and great food” according to Miyamoto, “but all of that costs money”.