Carla Clark | For The Republic Students learn to swing dance during the Dance Marathon, sponsored by Turning Point, held at Central Middle School, Saturday, February 29, 2020.
This year will see the return and combination of two community events geared toward teens.
Turning Point Domestic Services announced that its annual Dance Marathon would return this year and be held in combination with the annual After Prom, which was previously organized by the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department for Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. students.
“Turning Point is now the proud presenter of the historic event known as After Prom,” Turning Point officials said. “This is the perfect opportunity to merge the Dance Marathon and After Prom into one spectacular community event promoted as Dance Marathon: After Prom Party, a free event for all Bartholomew County high school students on Saturday, May 7, 2022.”
According to Prevention Team Director Stephen Dishinger, the bash will be held at Foundation For Youth, which has been the location for After Prom in previous years.
The event will be open to students in grades 9-12 and will continue to be student-led, with a callout meeting for interested high schoolers on Wednesday from 6 to 7 p.m. at Columbus East High School.
The combination of Dance Marathon and After Prom is intended to support Turning Point’s ongoing work to promote healthy relationships among teenagers. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the 2015 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey indicated that “26% of women and 15% of men who were victims of contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime first experienced these or other forms of violence by that partner before age 18.”
The CDC stated that dating violence can include psychological aggression and inappropriate behavior via technology.
“For 21 years, Dance Marathon has been a special opportunity for students in our community to learn about healthy relationships and how to recognize warning signs of unhealthy behaviors,” Turning Point officials said. “This year, Turning Point plans to reinforce the education that students received during their middle and high school years by combining these two long-standing events.”
In discussing the change, Dishinger noted that Dance Marathon was “a fundraiser, at its heart” for 21 years.
“We knew that we were going to need some sort of a reimagining, just because the landscapes are changing,” he said. “And really, in that 21 years, we’ve developed our prevention program into a much stronger entity than it was. So as we kind of took Dance Marathon on as our own, because for so many years it was a volunteer project, basically students threw it for us … now that we actually own it, we wanted to make some of the changes that reflected that our commitment was to prevention, first and foremost.”
Fundraising is still an element of the event, but prevention comes first, said Dishinger. And when the opportunity came to take over After Prom — previously organized by Columbus Parks and Recreation — Turning Point wanted to make sure that prevention was at the forefront of the event. He added that maintaining the fun of After Prom, with a focus on healthy relationships, was also important to the organization.
In talking with the parks department, Turning Point saw that the two events had a lot in common and appealed to the same demographic.
“It was just kind of a natural fit,” said Dishinger. “… We want to talk about healthy relationships, and what better time, really, to talk about relationships than at an after-prom event?”
Other factors in the decision-making process were timing and COVID-19. Typically, Dance Marathon is held at the end of February, but Turning Point officials weren’t sure if they would be able to hold the event at that time this year. They also didn’t want get too close to other existing events, so combining with After Prom was a “natural fit,” said Dishinger. He also hopes that pushing the event out to May might mean that the COVID-19 landscape will be different at that time.
While organizers are still determining the exact timeframe of the May 7 event, Dishinger said that it will not be as long as the traditional Dance Marathon.
The event will be free for all high schoolers in the county, regardless of which school they attend. Dishinger noted that this is a change from the traditional After Prom event, which was for previously students in the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp.
He added that there will still be elements of both events incorporated into the new one, such as having the “fun and food and music” of After Prom and continuing to make the event special for seniors and juniors.
“But we’re also going to have that element of inclusivity that we built into Dance Marathon, so it will be open to freshmen and sophomores and also students outside BCSC,” said Dishinger.
Seniors who attend the event will be eligible to win Sarah Cannon Dance Marathon college scholarships. Cannon, who died in June 2021, served on a number of community boards during her lifetime, including that of Turning Point.
“The passing of our good friend Sarah Cannon this year seemed like a perfect fit, her name on those scholarships,” said Dishinger. “But we have been offering those scholarships for the last several years.”
Another returning tradition is that while Turning Point is involved with organizing the event, it will still be largely student-driven.
“We’re still keeping the student input part of it (Dance Marathon),” said Dishinger. “…We will have our committee convene and students will, as they have always done, lead the majority of what goes into this. We have a broad idea of what we want, but the students are going to shape what they want it to be.”
According to Turning Point officials, the long-running event would not be possible without support from local students, parents, volunteers and businesses. All funds raised through Dance Marathon sponsorships and donations allow Turning Point’s prevention staff to present more than 1,500 prevention programs across the county every year.
The last Dance Marathon was held in February 2020, with more than 700 high school students in attendance. Student organizers and Turning Point staff had hoped to hold a scaled-back version or “mini-thon” in 2021, according to Turning Point President Lisa Shafran, but the event was canceled due to COVID-19 safety concerns.
While the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. was able to hold its most recent prom in May of 2021, school officials said at the time that After Prom would be postponed to 2022.
Turning Point will keep an eye on COVID-19 as this year’s Dance Marathon approaches, said Dishinger, and they hope to avoid another cancellation.
“When the time comes, we’ll assess for safety and do things as safe as we can,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll just be following the protocols that are in place at the time.”
