Millard West students’ hopes for another school dance at the end of the year was short lived as the idea for the ‘Flood Relief Dance 2019,’ was shut down on Friday, April 13th, due to administrative issues.

The idea for the Flood Relief Dance 2019, was first brought up in social studies teacher Alyssa Watson’s US Government class on Wednesday, April 10th. Watson, who had already been very involved in the recovery from the major flooding west of Omaha by organizing an assembly of sandwiches for first responders, was consulting with her class about other ways they could help their community through these hard times as their service learning project.

“We were discussing all block about possible ways we could raise money for the flood victims,” Watson said. “A dance was one of the last ideas, but once we came up with it, we were very excited and immediately ran with it as it would bring in the most money.”

Throughout the possible days that the Flood Relief Dance was supposed to be held, there were other events scheduled that students would have already had planned to attend such a district baseball, JV Track Metros and the UNO graduation ceremony. This along with lining up security and chaperones made organizing the event harder than it seemed.

“It is very hard to schedule a school dance this time of year,” Principal Dr. Greg Tiemann said. “There is so much security and administration issues that have to be coordinated in order for it to work.”

Another major scheduling conflict for the dance was the various graduation parties that were organized many months prior and may have conflicted with the event. Administration was worried that scheduling the dance on any given Friday night in May could result in a low attendance to the grad parties scheduled for that date.

Watson started to converse with Tiemann about the dance through email on Wednesday the 10th of April. She even sent seven students from her government class to officially pitch the idea to Dr. Tiemann. The students came back claiming that if they raised $2,000 dollars, the dance would be on.

“Tiemann said that the dance should be a celebration for reaching our goal,”  senior Cole Filer said, one of the main student organizers from the class. “He let us make our own goal of $2000 and told us to spread the word and we got right to it.”

Watson and her students quickly got to working on making the dance more of a reality, emailing DJ’s, chaperones, other sponsors and started selling tickets for $5 dollars as well as making a twitter page. Within a day, the class had already raised $250 from clubs sponsors, not counting the ticket sales.

At the end of the week, however, Watson received the email from Tiemann that the dance would not be happening.

“Many of the people in the class felt like their hard work they had done was for nothing,” Filer said. “I, along with another student, had already raised $400 dollars for flood relief from talking to almost every single classroom in the school.”

Despite there being no dance, administration is still willing to work with Watson’s Government class to look for ways to collect money for the flood victims. Although they are still in the works, possible ideas include selling T-shirts in which a percentage of the proceeds would go to the flood victims. The T-shirts then would become a ticket to a movie during 2nd block. Another possible idea is organizing a collection of supplies that they could then ship out to the people that need them.

“There is also a lot of planning that has to go into the T-shirt idea,” Watson said. “Of course we’d have to buy the shirts so not all the proceeds would be going to flood relief and we still need to wait to get the rights to show the movie that we pick.”

The Flood Relief Dance 2019, might’ve not been a reality, but there are still many other social events at Millard West to look forward to. Students can still take advantage of events like Swing Night and the Senior Dinner for the senior class.