I dropped my two children who attend Tracy High School at their homecoming dance before 9 p.m. Friday, thinking they would be safe. I received a call from my daughter at 10:45 p.m., telling me that she and many other students were still in line waiting to get into the dance. I proceeded to the school to see what was going on, and this is what I found:

Children were outside in a darkened parking lot in

57-degree weather, while other children were being hand-selected to enter into the dance that was going to end at midnight. When I asked to speak to someone in charge, no one could locate Principal Pat Anastasio. I talked to two Tracy police officers at the door of the cafeteria and they agreed it was unacceptable for children to wait for two hours to get into a dance.

How safe can this be for children to be wandering around a high school campus and through dark parking lots with no supervision at a school function that could have been harmful to them? The school’s reply was there was security on campus, which I never saw, except at the front door of the dance, which had about 20 children at about 11 p.m. If a dance was to start at 9 p.m., why were children in line for

two hours waiting to get in?

• Mike White is the father of two Tracy High School students.