Monday, Jan. 26, 2015 | Volume 210 | Number 85 | 40 cents | iowastatedaily.com | An independent student newspaper serving Iowa State since 1890.
FOR THE KIDS Dance Marathon raises money for Children’s Miracle Network By Wendy.Cardwell @iowastatedaily.com
P
op music consumed the Great Hall of the Memorial Union as Dance Marathon held its 18th annual fundraiser to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. The event began at midnight Saturday and concluded at midnight Sunday. Dance Marathon is a student organization that provides year-round support to youth cancer victims and their families. Students, volunteers and families participate in several forms of entertainment while standing on their feet and dancing for hours at a time. Students who fundraise and dance at the event spend the year learning leadership skills while interacting with a miracle child and their family. Several activities were hosted to keep the families, volunteers and children busy. A few of these activities included beanbag toss, talent show, a hypnotist, laser tag, four square, a fashion show and of course dancing. The primary goal of these activities was to raise additional money for children with cancer and to educate and raise awareness in the community. Participants wore different colored T-shirts to represent their role at the event. Blue was for the dancers, yellow for families, red for the families committee, black for operations, light blue for alumni, mint-green for recruitment and dancer relations, purple for business relations
and white for executives. This year, Dance Marathon hosted a Disney-themed event. Student dancers volunteer for Dance Marathon to connect with the kids and stay on their feet throughout the entire time. Several families attended the event to support each other and connect with other families that are going through similar situations. Dance Marathon was highlighted by speeches from parents of children with cancer and cancer survivors. Laura Stauffer, a mother of two, attended the event with her family. She thinks of her son Caiden as a happy 6-yearold boy who loves soccer, reading, science and rough housing with other little boys. However, that is not the only thing that consumes her mind. Her son has been diagnosed with numerous issues throughout the years, including anxiety disorder, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, developmental delays, sensory chronic migraines and more than 45 environmental and food allergies. “One of the things that drew me to Dance Marathon was the fact that they supported, respected and appreciated children with special needs, and made them feel special for who they were and were able to help celebrate their unique qualities,” Stauffer said. Dance Marathon has provided families with support and love they need to connect with other families at the event each year.
#FTK p4
Kelby Wingert/Iowa State Daily
Six-year-old Caiden Stauffer works on crafts with his mother, Laura, in the family room at Dance Marathon on Jan. 24. Caiden is a Dance Marathon “miracle kid” and has been diagnosed with a number of health issues.
Iowa group sets goals at human trafficking meeting By Danielle.Ferguson @iowastatedaily.com
Kelly McGowan/Iowa State Daily
A Boy Scout asks his ROTC instructor a question while learning about how to treat hypothermia in a winter survival situation. Scouts attended sessions on land navigation, signaling, first aid and personal hygiene in the Armory on Jan. 24.
Boy Scouts learn winter survival skills from cadets By Kelly.McGowan @iowastatedaily.com An Eagle Scout and ROTC cadet led nearly 300 Boy Scouts in the Scout Oath on the Armory bleachers Jan. 24. “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country,” said Benjamin Brixius, junior in kinesiology and health. He recited the oath to start the 28th annual Boy Scout Winter Survival Training hosted by ROTC cadets at Iowa State. Teams of cadets volunteered to teach courses, as 12 to 17-yearold scouts rotated through. Classes in the Armory covered land navigation, signaling, first aid and personal hygiene. Outdoor classes in Pammel Woods covered fire and shelter building and water and food procurement. Sparse snow and a 48-degree high made for a different training than previous years.
Todd Eipperle, a first sergeant of military intelligence in the National Guard and field director for the Mid Iowa Council for the Boy Scouts of America, saw the benefits that scouting provided during his deployment to Iraq in 2003 and works to share those benefits with young scouts. Seeing Brixius lead the event showed the scouts an example of what they could do in the future, Eipperle said. Boy Scouts follows a military structure and many ROTC cadets are former scouts. Around 11 ISU cadets reached the rank of Eagle Scout. Cadet Matthew Kelly, sophomore in chemistry, is one of them. He joined at age 15. This is later than most scouts, but he saw that being an Eagle Scout would help with an ROTC scholarship and joined. Kelly got the scout rank on his first day and reached Eagle Scout in one year and seven
months. This designation requires involvement and service in a scouting unit for six months, demonstrated adherence to the Scout Oath and Scout Law, 21 merit badges, a service project, a unit leader’s conference and completion of the Eagle Scout board of review. “When we come out and introduce ourselves as Eagle Scouts, you can see their eyes get real big,” Kelly said. “Wearing this uniform, they look up to us as role models and as leaders and I think that’s just something incredible.” He taught scouts about finding food in the wilderness. “You never know when you’re going to get stuck in a survival situation,” Kelly said Joshua Smith, leader of Troop 346 in Jasper County, came to this training at Iowa State when he was a Boy Scout
SURVIVAL p4
A central Iowa group dedicated to stopping human trafficking is calling upon the state’s youth to help raise awareness. Human trafficking is the illegal movement of people, forcing them to work in the sex trade or perform any kind of labor by using forms of coercion, abduction, fraud or deception. Passing new trafficking-sensitive legislation, training law enforcement to detect human trafficking situations and brainstorming ideas on how to raise awareness on trafficked minorities in Iowa were some of the main goals at The Central Iowa Service Network Against Human Trafficking meeting on Jan.23. Runaway or homeless children are most susceptible to being trafficked, said Teresa DowningMatibag, co-chairwoman of the network. “The longer a youth remains homeless or runaway ... the higher the chance they’re going to be brought into the sex trade,” she said. Downing-Matibag, also an ISU sociology lecturer, said she wants to bring focus to trafficking in minority children, especially those whom identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. “Up to 40 percent of street youth are LGBT youth,” she said. About 26 percent of the LGBT youth on the streets were kicked out of the house, Downing-Matibag said. “Once trafficked, these children face beatings, mutilations, brandings, rapes and a host of other crimes no child should ever live through,” Downing-Matibag read from a US trafficking in persons report. Some representatives spoke with the Iowa Community College Association to initiate adult community training in order to educate people to recognize the signs of human trafficking in their
areas. The curriculum includes how to recognize the signs of a trafficking victim and to learn the risk factors of those who are most likely to be trafficked. “Look for the absence of normal. If something does not look right, call,” said Terry Hernandez, executive director for the Chrysalis Foundation, a women’s foundation in Des Moines. “What we hear from law enforcement is, ‘we would much rather you be wrong, than have us miss a case.’” One of the hurdles in training law enforcement isn’t the training itself, Downing-Matibag said, but the number of officers available to train. In states with similar populations to Iowa, the average ratio of officers to civilians is about 1-to481. Iowa’s officer to civilian ratio is 1-to-589, according to the latest FBI full time law enforcement employees report in 2011. Kelly Butcher, president of Iowa State’s chapter of the Network Against Human Trafficking, was there to update the network on her chapter’s progress and goals, which includes raising awareness on labor trafficking in addition to the sex trade. “You hear about sex trafficking and it’s devastating, but you think, OK what can I do? I’m not buying sex. I’m not watching porn, so I’m just going to keep doing my life,” said Butcher, a senior in psychology. “With labor trafficking, we’re all contributing to that with the products that we buy. If we make them more aware of those things, that would be huge.” Butcher said the issue of human trafficking is important for college and high school aged students to be aware of because they are part of the generation to catch. “If you get to the just out of college and beyond population, it’s almost too late,” she said. “Whereas if you hit the high schoolers and college kids who are going to be the ones whom then buy or watch porn, and they know about it ahead of time, then they are less likely to do it.”