This year the Out-of-Door-Academy has started a new event called Dance-A-Thon. The idea was derived from Penn State’s THON. THON is a huge dance marathon designed to raise money for research in pediatric cancer. It was first organized in 1973 by a group of students at Penn State. This event has inspired high schools, middle schools and even elementary schools all over the country to dance and raise money for various causes. Penn State got into the top ten biggest college fundraisers with their last Dance-A-Thon raising an incredible $10,686,934.83 to benefit the Four Diamonds Fund, a charity devoted to defeating pediatric cancer.

The point of a dance marathon is to stay dancing for as long as possible and to always stay on your feet dancing. There are bands playing, performances and dancing games to keep the dancers going.

Out-of-Door Academy’s Dance-A-Thon raised $2,000.  All of the money raised will be going towards helping to prevent teen suicide. The organization that all of the money will be going to is the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Money for the organization was raised prior to the event. At the dance, there were games held at the dance to help raise even more money. Some of those games included competitions to see who could dance for the longest amount of time, single dance competitions, doubles dance competition and much more!

Kevin Grathwohl ’14, said that he had a lot of fun, but next year he said it would be better if more people came. He said if more people were there then they could of played more dancing games and raised more money.