Just over 140 Cochrane High School students stayed awake for 24 hours for their first ever Wake-a-Thon on February 8 and 9.

While the school has done many fundraisers over the year, the Cobras supported the idea of fundraising for a school room in Kenya thanks to grade 12 student Chelsea Luft.

Luft brought the idea forward mid last year to her Leadership teachers after she visited Kenya the year prior. "I travelled to Kenya in the summer of 2016 to build schools there and I really had a great connection with the community and I wanted to give back to them because they had given so much to me. I decided to approach my teachers about doing this; last year we did a whole bunch of kind of smaller fundraisers and we decided we needed to do a big one this year to kind of summarize all of it and get the full money raised. We were originally going to do a walk-a-thon, we thought about a bike-a-thon and then we decided upon a wake-a-thon because we thought there would be the most amount of student interest, which there was, we had a great turn out. It started from my trip mostly."

Students worked hard at collecting pledges, plus paid registration and food fees, while the grand total was not quite tallied, they managed to reach their goal. "Our goal was to raise $10,000 which is enough to build one classroom in the community which is what we raised. We think we might have raised a little more than that but around $10,000 is where we hit."

Students spent the 24 hour period in teams anywhere from 3 to 20 people, competing in a variety of physical games and activities, baking cooking, and watching a movie.

While Leadership teachers Gale Cote and Lisa Gordon-Reece are not advocating to do another Wake-a-thon quite yet, they said the event went very well and they were extremely proud of how well the students did.