Iowa’s popular fundraiser, Dance Marathon, is back at Ankeny High School (AHS) for the second year since COVID. The event raised $10,249 and all of the money goes directly to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

“A lot of times when kids have serious illnesses, the equipment that we have to treat those illnesses is made for adults. So they have to get custom equipment that’s kid sized,” the National Honor Society (NHS) sponsor Jennifer Poole explained. “And also the families, they have to stay there a long time, and there’s just a lot of mental exhaustion that goes along with having a child in the hospital for that long, so they provide a lot of support for families in addition to the medical care the kids are receiving.”

Organized by NHS, the club had high goals for this year’s event. Aside from only raising the $10,249 out of the $25,000 goal, NHS hoped for 250 participants but only had 114 signed up before the event.

“We have a higher goal this year than last year; we just want more people to come and raise awareness, as a fact that this is a thing in our community. I think a lot of Ankeny High School students don’t know that there’s people in this building that have benefited from this hospital,” Poole said.

To emphasize the impact of fundraisers and the hospitals they support, Dance Marathons allow speakers to address the issue they are fundraising for and how the hospital has personally impacted them.

“We have been in contact with a few different [people], both kids and teenagers who have either gone to said family children’s hospital or are currently in treatment,” junior and lead of the Dance Marathon fundraiser through NHS Landry Wagner said.

Wagner explained that NHS finds their speakers or families with impacted kids through personal connections and AHS Alumni.

“It’s just been really special to hear their stories and hear how fundraisers like this have impacted their lives, and there’s actually one speaker, who’s gonna be at the event, who is currently in treatment there, and then one who made a video to be shown at the event and on the Instagram, and she just finished up [treatment],” Wagner explained.

Due to the fundraising aspect, there has been a lot of confusion around the classification of Dance Marathon. Without a dress code, students hesitate to call it a dance. There are games and inflatables which further separate the event from classic dances like prom. However, Poole stated Dance Marathon is fundamentally a dance.

“The whole point is that you are standing in solidarity. So for those six hours, you’re on your feet the entire time for the children who cannot be on their feet,” NHS President Addison Meyer said.

Though students didn’t wear dresses or suits, there’s a free shirt that came with registering before Apr. 11. The Dance Marathon has a theme like any other dance, this year it was ‘Glow Out’. 

“We’re going to have, obviously, a lot of dancing, inflatable machines, yard games, and then at the top of every hour, each of those teams that fundraised online before the event, they will then compete in a different UTL [Under the Lights] style activities,” Meyer said.

UTL is an Ankeny field day before the Homecoming dance where students create teams to compete in many different activities. The Dance Marathon also had teams, and NHS tried to incorporate those teams into the event more this year through competition.

“Prior to the physical event itself, students have an online donor drive where they raise money through online donations,” Meyer explains, “[after registration] you have a page, you can talk about who you are, you can set up a goal, you can join teams, and then you can set your own fundraising goal. You can set a fundraising goal as a team…Then all of the teams can then compete against each other to see who can raise the most.”