It’s no surprise that IHS is on a steady decline to demolition. We have recently surpassed the one hundredth day of the 2022-23 school year, and new issues are being brought up by the second. Our current seniors have noticed a significant change in IHS since their freshman year, and we can only hypothesize that this is because of the IHS ghosts, Moaning Magnolia and Peter the Poltergeist. After all, the random dispensing of paper towels in the upstairs-K bathrooms and the strange noises echoing from the radiators were never justified. To investigate, we’ve administered a multivariate analysis after collecting considerable important data. What we have discovered is promising.
Students passing through the orchestra room (likely trespassing and ignoring the clear “There is NO passing through this classroom” sign) may have noticed that, a few weeks ago, the orchestra room appeared to be not much warmer than the snowy outdoors. And, the following week (again, likely trespassing), you may have noticed that the previously sub-sixty degree room had warmed up to a steamy eighty-six degrees.
While the orchestra students were evacuated from the dangerous temperatures by a courageous Mr. Fleischman, the wooden instruments—the youngest of which saw the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell after the execution of Charles I—were brutally massacred. Strings snapped, pegs broken, and wood cracked, the poor instruments fled to their owners, begging to be saved from the temperature fluctuations and the room’s dryness.
Despite the instruments’ inability to survive in such temperatures—and, more broadly speaking, the average IHS students’ excruciating discomfort in such conditions—several species have managed to flourish. Perhaps the strange radiator noises can now be accounted for…
Last year, Amadeus, a brunet rodent of slight build, entered into prominence after being spotted near the cellos in the orchestra room. Additional sightings of the celebrity mouse may have been of his frequent companion, Pyotr Ilyich.
Upon interviewing Amadeus, we discovered that he may have been a spy hired by the band kids. Such espionage will not be tolerated. Rodents—both figuratively and literally—have been spotted all across the rest of IHS campus as well, notably in chemistry classrooms, where rodent excrement large enough to “make fuel” was found in the storeroom, along with a dead rat (in the words of renowned chemistry teacher Andrew Lesser). Rats are theorized to be behind the strange radiator noises in at least one chemistry classroom, and, as many are aware, former AP Euro teacher Mr. Prokosch had a running tally of the number of rodents he found (and killed) in his classroom. Whether these rodents are here to spread the plague or monitor us and report back to the government remains unknown at this time.
Rodents are not the only type of animal that have found a home on campus. Last year, a duck (and mini-ducks, known as ducklings in some circles) made a home in the Quad. This year, the threat is much greater; the rabid fox spotted around Fall Creek, believed to be the duck reincarnated, has dug itself a burrow under one of the G-building classrooms. The fox is very dangerous and IHS Animal Service advises you to avoid going near this creature (some believe it does not have rabies, but rather is using the symptoms as a distraction from the information it is collecting on IHS students). It is predicted that the small rodents at IHS have invited capybaras from South America, and they are on their way to establish themselves as an invasive species and displace the administration from their houses (the administration in question will be alright; they have housing on Highway 13 now).
Additionally, the door shortage at IHS cannot go unnoticed. Although it was announced that it was a supply-chain issue that has affected schools nationally, it seems that IHS lacks more doors than any other school in our area. Missing and broken doors have been waiting to be replaced for months, and one can only assume that these doors are being delivered through snail mail to avoid a twenty dollar shipping fee for a faster delivery rate. On the other hand, a massive graveyard of tables keeps appearing in our hallways. Furthermore, a huge batch of triangle tables once located in the Quad have vanished, the trackers once planted under each table no longer receiving signals.
The graffiti problem has gotten worse in recent weeks. Since students’ pens, pencils, and markers have been confiscated due to a rise in graffiti, students have resorted to using Swiss Army knives to carve into walls, desks, bathroom stalls, and doors (the few that still exist in IHS)—really any surface they can get their hands on. Such actions are weakening the unsteady foundation of IHS and will—literally—shake the school to its core.
Finally, few are unaware of perhaps the greatest indication of our school’s steady decline. The perpetual falling ceiling tiles plague the buildings of IHS more than the rats plague our students. The student body has found themselves playing a reverse game of “The Floor Is Lava” to try and dodge the aerial projectiles. Rather peculiarly, the ceiling tiles’ falling rate has increased in a predictable pattern; last Monday, two were noted to have fallen, while four had fallen the next day, and eight on Wednesday:
The issues above can all be treated as variables that are contributing to the fall of The High Schoolian Empire of Ithaca, New York. A statistical analysis was conducted by former AP Statistics students with many statistical qualifications, and these students can report with a confidence level of 99.9999 percent that IHS is likely to be razed to the ground within the next two weeks to thirty years. Additionally, when using these variables as predictors of a binary outcome (whether IHS would or would not fall), we obtained a p-value of 0.00000000001, meaning that these results are observed basically zero percent of the time when schools do not get razed to the ground. This will shock you: it turns out that barely the remains of IHS will be spotted on 1401 N Cayuga St by the year 2053. Miraculously, if considering the scoreboard as independent from the rest of IHS, it is predicted to survive far past this date. It is only when the Sun explodes (human beings have long since relocated to Pluto) that the scoreboard will finally fall.
Above is a graph depicting the causal relationship between number of rats and the likelihood of IHS to fall. The last three points are extrapolated, as we have not yet counted more than 60 rats.
However, there is still hope. As a strong correlation was found between the severity of the previously-described problems and the likelihood of IHS falling, we know that these aforementioned problems will lead to our school’s demise. Therefore, to prevent the fall of IHS, all we must do is combat these problems. For example, even flatlining the number of falling ceiling tiles is predicted to drop the likelihood of IHS to fall within ten years from ninety percent to twenty-five percent, which, with a p-value of 0.000001, is, according to renowned statistician and statistically-skilled AP Statistics teacher Mr. Kirk, “vanishingly, extravagantly, and staggeringly significant.” If all problems are eliminated, then IHS will certainly be saved. If we eliminate the explanatory variables, then the response variable will have to be eliminated, as well, since the explanatory variables were causing the response.
However, the fight to save our school won’t be easy, and we need every student’s voice to make change a reality. The time to act is now! Please go to www.change.org/fix-our-school to petition the IHS admin to fix our school before it is too late.
A fan photo of Amadeus, or possibly Pyotr Ilyich, courtesy of The Jackson Laboratory (AKA the fan base of Amadeus and Pyotr Ilyich)
