MAIZE ? Schools in the Wichita area and elsewhere in the state are cracking down on inappropriate dancing at their functions, and some students are responding by staying away from the events.

Maize High School Principal Mike Bonner says he was shocked when he saw students “freak dancing,” or grinding against each other in a sexually provocative way.

“It was to the point where I thought, ‘If a member of the community came up here and watched our kids dancing right now, would we be proud of this?’ And the answer was no,” Bonner told The Wichita Eagle.

Bonner had informed students about a “no grinding” rule through e-mails, posters and newsletters before last fall’s homecoming dance, but nobody seemed to be paying attention.

“The kids were blatantly kind of saying, ‘Forget you, we’re going to do it anyway,”‘ he said.

When he turned off the music at the dance and reminded students about the rule, more than 500 of them walked out. Later at a winter homecoming, attendance was way down.

Bonner said he plans to continue enforcing the new rules this year because the inappropriate dancing has gone too far.

“I was worried that we were being old fogies,” the 47-year-old Bonner said. “I thought, ‘Maybe I’m just getting older and not seeing things clearly.’

“But when you see kids doing some of the things they were doing … It’s completely inappropriate. It crossed a line, and we had to say, ‘Hey, this is school, and we have different expectations.”

Students in Salina are protesting a new school policy there that requires them to “maintain appropriate personal space.” Only about a half-dozen students showed up at Salina Central High School’s recent back-to-school dance.

“Everybody’s staying away,” Salina junior Tayshaw Long told the Salina Journal last week. “We can’t dance the way we dance.”

Other schools say freak dancing has proliferated at school dances and kept chaperones busy.

“I tap a lot of shoulders,” said Sherman Padgett, principal at North High School in Wichita. “If we see a kid or a group of kids getting just too close or too carried away, we go over there immediately and they know.

“I say, ‘Pretend like that’s my daughter, boy. Show the appropriate space that a dad would expect.’ Usually that’s all that it takes.”