A recent document leak reveals that the CHCCS Board of Education has been withholding resources and sabotaging programs at East for several years as part of a secret research initiative.
While implementing student supports and promoting general wellbeing at the district’s other high schools, CHCCS has deliberately stifled all efforts at improving and reforming East in order to maintain its status as a “wellness control group.”
“East has to remain in such a sorry state so that we can compare the conditions of that school against the rest of the district,” said district spokesperson Ulysses Alberry at a press conference Dec. 10. “That way we can specifically measure the impact of new policies at the other schools. While it may seem sinister, this conspiracy was carried out with the best interests of the district in mind.”
In order to pull off this project, CHCCS signed a 10-year contract with educational research company Lyrnamid Sciencing. Lyrnamid’s head researcher Dr. Sy Innsman took a keen interest in the case.
“I thought that there was major potential there,” Innsman said. “CHCCS was willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of an entire school’s studentry for the sake of collecting this invaluable data. It was a bold step, and one most people wouldn’t be willing to take.”
There was very little debate around which CHCCS school would make the best control group.
“It was always going to be East,” Innsman said. “I mean, that place had no distinguishing qualities. They didn’t even have a school color. It was the perfect generic baseline school for our purposes.”
Upon selecting East, strict measures were imposed to prevent the school from allowing any real improvement to occur. Only the most superficial and unhelpful wellness-oriented programs were permitted to go into effect.
“We let East implement something called PAC,” Innsman said. “It was actually really helpful, since it gave the appearance of caring about the students without providing any actual benefits that would skew the data.”
Though Innsman and his team say their experiment has not yet produced definitive results, certain trends do emerge from the data.
“For one thing, we found that at the schools where they had supports in place for students, the students actually felt much more supported than in the control group,” Innsman said.
Innsman and Alberry both say that if it can withstand the document leak scandal, the experiment will continue. After all, it has survived other recent challenges.
“We thought that this new principal would throw a wrench in the works, what with the new school color and the safety initiatives,” Innsman said. “But thankfully none of Mr. Casey’s policies have had any measurable effect on student wellness.”
Photo by Hammond Cole Sherouse/The ECHO
