School balls!
School dances are the most challenging forms of Karaoke there is! The kids are energetic, they'll swarm you like bees, they are all talking at once, and they all want to see your CDs. And, they all want to sing at the SAME time. If you are by yourself, this is like trying to take a drink of water from a fully opened fire hydrant. I suggest don't do school dances by yourself. Either bring an assistant or arrange in advance with the school to have either a student help you out with the requests, or assign a staff member or chaperone to help you out.

The biggest problem with Karaoke at school dances are the song selections. They will invariably pick the tunes of today with sexual and explicit lyrics. Even though your Karaoke discs have these words blanked out, the kids will feel like they have to sing them! To overcome this you may say "We all know what this song says, please do NOT repeat these words, or I will have to turn the song off". If you get the F word - just stop the song and explain why! Just joke with the person and say "I thought you had more smarts not to say the 'F' word in front of adults let alone over the P.A. system - so it's detention for you - next person up! " Or " Sorry we don't have that song - choose something else".

Don't fence me in!
The other very difficult thing is that everyone will crowd the singer and watch the TV lyrics. So what ends up happening is that you have a huge crowd, they are wrestling the microphone, banging it, and screaming into it. As a side note, it's a good idea to have a compressor. If the school has a big screen TV, hook a second line from your player to this TV. This will often diffuse the crowd around the TV stand and Mics. Set up your TV stand about 3 ft in front of the stage area and the Big screen TV about 10 ft away from that. Often, you won't get as many kids crowding around the TV stand.

Controlling the little buggers!
So what can you do to try to control an audience of 80 to 200 exuberant kids in hormone and sensory overload? How much dance are you going to do? How much Karaoke is going to be done? It will be more chaotic than ever a club will. Listed below are possible approaches.

Minimise the number of singers!
Buy a huge roll of numbered tickets. Have the staff give those out as the kids enter the dance area. Introduce yourself, and explain to them that you will be drawing for people to sing. You can draw three tickets at a time to do sets, announce them, have ONLY them come up to select songs from your lists, and continue dance sets. Then once you are ready, you can bring your singers up with wedding style "grand introductions".

Another approach is to simply try to instruct the kids that only the person who selected the song can sing it, and there is to be no crowding of the stage area. This is less effective because the attention span when kids are in party mode is ZERO. Most times, they don't listen. This is when your chances of having equipment damaged are the greatest. This is when you definitely want to get the staff involved, and let them be the heavy in controlling.

What about the distribution of songbooks and sign up? Use the slip system, have a table out away from your area with the songbooks, loads of blank slips and pencils. Let them crowd each other, then bring you the slips, then you can arrange them and screen them for completeness. This is much easier on you, as they won't be pushing and crowding the Karaoke area.

By now you may be thinking, "why in the world am I going to do this if there are so many negatives?"

The fact is that if you can maintain some semblance of order, you can feed off their energy and give it back to them in the form of interactivity skits and dance music as well as Karaoke. Unless it is an ALL Karaoke party, you won't be doing Karaoke exclusively, so you again have the options of doing skits and dance music. Not all of the kids will want to do Karaoke, but they will want to be close by to check it out. Very few of them are obnoxious on purpose, but you need to be friendly and firm if you have problems. Be patient, explain it to them, and move on. Above all, work closely with the staff during the show; maybe arrange some discreet visual signals to involve them if you see things getting out of hand. On a positive note you can get a good reputation at school functions and lots of forward bookings if the kids like you!