Don’t let the unseasonably cool temperatures fool you, because social media is forecasting what the weatherman cannot: Spring Break is about to bust out.
And we happen to live in one of the top destinations for those young adults intent on making memories, even if they don’t remember them all. As one put it on her Twitter feed, ““I live for the nights that I can’t remember with the people that I won’t forget.”
As a former college student who came down to Panama City Beach from Atlanta for a Spring Break a long time ago, I can smile and remember the fun I had down here as an 18-year-old and wish those kids well. As a parent with a young child, I can look at that and shudder and worry and know that the time will come when it’s my kid out there, not someone else’s.
As a Bay County resident, I know I can also look forward to the annual debate, which simplified, might be summed up like this: “Spring Break: Good or bad?”
The reality is Spring Break brings some things that are worthy of complaint and is something that has been debated here for about as long as it has been around.
On one hand it is a powerful economic engine, with some businesses’ success for the year being based on the success of Spring Break. It creates a torrid of cash through bed tax collections, sales taxes and business in general. It creates memories, mostly good, for hundreds of thousands of young adults.
On the other hand, with the arrival of Spring Break and the hordes of college students, we basically are giving up our beaches for about five weeks. It’s kind of our rude reminder after a quiet winter that the beaches, the very thing that drives our economic engine, is something we have to share with the world.
We give it up for five weeks or so, then we get some of it back for the rest of the summer.
But more than anything else, it is the focus on partying, the heavy drinking, the decadence of youth and the foolishness that inevitably leads to people dying that focuses the anti-Spring Break crowd. We already, as of Friday, have an ongoing search for a missing student.
If you’ve spent enough time on the beach during Spring Break, you’ve likely felt that indescribable pulse that seems to synch with the bass beats erupting from oversized speakers as something inside you warns that it is about to get out of control.
You can read the paper or watch the news over the next month and know there is a high probability there will be some combination of balcony fall deaths, drownings, deaths from alcohol overdose.
The question, for me, is how much of all of the above is preventable, how much is inevitable with or without Spring Break, and how representative are those events of the overall Spring Break experience?
For too long we accepted that the spring breakers were essentially in charge of their behavior up until the point they erupted, and then law enforcement – understaffed and weary – would react with a show of force and arrests until things calmed down.
That’s not the case anymore, with a beefed up Panama City Beach Police Department and Bay County Sheriff’s Office contingent reinforced by other agencies and supported with funding from the Tourism Development Council. What was once a reactive approach is now a proactive one, with a helicopter monitoring traffic so it can be redirected when needed. Crowds giving signs of chaos can be addressed early.
Tragedy is going to strike college kids, whether they are here or tucked in the heart of their campuses. That doesn’t stop before or after they travel here for Spring Break. It wouldn’t stop if they kept their Spring Break on campus.
This isn’t to say it is acceptable, it is to say simply that it is, and nothing will change that.
But what can mitigate it is the continued refinement of how law enforcement approaches it, and each year that seems to progress based on what was learned the year before.
We can only hope that continues and that our guests stay safe, enjoy themselves and return safely, and that we continue to do the right thing while they are here to help them on that path.