Every year Rocklin High School has a casual dance the week after break called Runaway.

This year a total of 30 people attended the dance. When students were asked whether or not they attended the runaway dance, a staggering 91.53 percent of respondents said no. Seeing as how ASB puts in the same amount of effort for every dance, it is disappointing for them have such incredibly low attendance.

This begs the question, “ Why doesn’t anyone go?”.  

Mr. John Thompson, the ASB activities director, had this to say.

“At Rocklin High school we have 8 dances a year. There’s 3 dances in the middle. One in the late fall (the halloween dance), one in January which is Runaway, and there’s one in February which has traditionally been the blacklight dance. All three of those dances have struggled as of late. We’re not really getting a large attendance at any of them. [Student government] is trying to connect students to the campus in a positive way. When [attendance] dips below 300 I start to question whether or not the campus still wants a dance in that time frame. [With the] January dance, we’re starting to figure out that people are coming back from Christmas break. They’re extremely tired by the time it gets to Friday night, and they’re just not really wanting to go to a dance. They like the hype of the week, but the dance is too much. There’s also hotshots games going on and other things that kids are going to. The kids decided last year to turn that into a semi formal like homecoming. So we’re going to make that dance the casual dance price, casual dance time frame from 8 to 11, [and] we’re going to dress it up the best we can in a small amount of time and make it a semiformal. There seems to be a desire for another semi formal. We’ll see if that happens. We had a lot of long conversations with student government about what is happening, and my best guess at this point is there are too many dances. Kids just aren’t excited to go to a dance because the next one is right around the corner. So what we’re gonna do next year is take the January and February dance and combine them into one and have one less dance next year. We’re still gonna have runaway week still the week we get back, there just won’t be a dance at the end of the week.”

At the moment, it’s not looking great for the Runaway dance. ASB seems to be picking up on the message that nobody wants a dance that week anymore. Next year, it’s very likely that runaway will not exist.