This past Saturday night, the police arrested 15 Governor Dummer Academy students for underage drinking at the house of a GDA Senior in Danvers, MA – a few miles from the school’s campus in Byfield. According to fellow GDA Senior Tod Eudailey ’06, the police counted 250 empty bottles at the student’s house. All the students at the house were arrested. The neighbors notified the police when a friend of the student from Danvers, not from GDA, arrived at the party and began to cause a disturbance in the neighborhood. The boy was said to be screaming and creating a scene in the yard. All of the students have been tried in court, though some qualified for a juvenile trial. Others were over 18 years old and are therefore no longer considered minors, thus requiring them to stand before a regular court. The students were tried in court this past Monday, yet judgment is still pending and will be settled following another court date. Governor Dummer has not yet officially responded to or informed its students of the incident. The school has yet to decide how the offending students will be punished. The arrested students have attended classes and athletic practices as usual. Governor Dummer does have a special “training room” rule that does not allow any student caught ingesting illegal substances to participate in games for a week. If any student is apprehended a second time, the school will remove him or her from the team. The only other official punishment currently confronting the students is mandated community service. When asked about the state of the student body at GDA, GDA Senior Britney McKenna said, “Everything is pretty normal. I mean it has mostly just stirred [up] a lot of gossip.”
