Dancing for their lives

IU Dance Marathon is in a little bit of a bind.\nIUDM is one of the charitable organizations that makes use of the class registration system for donations. You've all seen it before; after you pick your classes, you can click on the boxes in the optional screen to buy football tickets, opera tickets, theater tickets or donate to IUDM or the IU Student Association Rape Crisis Fund.\nIUDM may lose that option soon if it doesn't get at least 10 percent of the student body to check that box. University regulations stipulate IUDM has to get at least 10 percent of the student body to donate to the organization online in order for it to stay on the registration checklist. This regulation is supposed to keep the list clean of other, non-charitable organizations. Supposedly, if that rule were scrapped, every other student organization could solicit funding from students through the registration checklist, making the list too long to read and nearly impossible for tech support to program.\n What makes that last item a little hard to swallow is that every other non-charitable student organization that is properly registered with the student activities office is eligible for money from student activity fees and IU Student Association's Commitment to Assist Student Initiatives funding. Every organization on campus, from the College Republicans to the Citizen's Alliance for the Legalization of Marijuana, is eligible for this money.\nDance Marathon, on the other hand, is a charity that supports Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. Students solicit pledges as we well as in-hand donations and then dance, play and remain standing for 36 hours straight. Children who are patients at Riley often come down during the marathon to visit the participants.\nSome blame lack of awareness for the shortage of registration funding. Others blame the news system, OneStart/PeopleSoft, because the new selection screen has been complained about as being too confusing to navigate.\nEither way, Dance Marathon is too important to lose a source of funding.\nStudents who have not yet registered, or even students who just want to go back into the system and donate, still can. On the screen where you select football tickets and such, check the box for IUDM and click submit, then continue.\nTo meet its goal, the organization will have to receive more hits than it ever has. Internal Vice President Ashley Crouse said in the April 21 IDS, the organization needs to receive 4,000 online donations -- but they've never had more than 1,000. \nEven if all else fails, IU should consider letting IUDM stay on the list even if it doesn't reach its 10 percent goal. What other organization on campus does what it does?\nAnd who else can prove it every year?