Strike up the band, after all.

Two Long Island high schools that canceled their annual senior proms – after years of burgeoning excesses that included liquor-loaded limos and weekend house rentals in the Hamptons – announced a compromise yesterday that will have students attending chaperone-laden dinner cruises around Manhattan.

Instead of limousines, tuxedos, and fancy ball gowns, students will dress “business class” – jackets and ties for the boys and dresses for the girls – and travel via coach bus to and from their schools to a Manhattan pier, where they will board a boat for a dinner/dance cruise.

Faculty members will also attend. The cost is expected to be about $100 a student – tip money compared to some of the wild parties of the past.

“The thing that we’re most pleased about is that this recommendation came from the students,” Brother Kenneth Hoagland, the principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School in Uniondale, said.

Mr. Hoagland sparked a national debate about the ostentatiousness and debauchery that accompany many senior proms when he said last fall that his school would no longer sponsor the annual spring flings.

Weeks after Mr. Hoagland canceled the Kellenberg prom, officials at nearby Chaminade High School also said they would no longer be in the prom business. Both are private Catholic schools run by the Marianist religious order of priests and brothers.

Mr. Hoagland had issued a 2,000-word missive to Kellenberg students and parents, decrying the “bacchanalian aspects” of that school’s prom:

“It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be; it is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity’s sake – in a word, financial decadence,” Mr. Hoagland said in his letter.

Mr. Hoagland said that after an Associated Press story about the canceled proms was widely published last October, he received more than 5,000 emails from as far away as Australia, Mexico, Canada, and around America, and only 19 criticized the decision.

“Most people told us that proms were out of control and we were right on the mark,” he said.

He said the decision to cancel the prom “awakened people and gave them courage to stand up, and I think that has helped restore things to sanity.”

“The students came to us … after reading our letter, saying they understand there have been abuses and they accept that as a problem,” Mr. Hoagland said in a telephone interview yesterday.