Roxy Hudson
For many years, the leaders of the Poway Unified School District (PUSD) have been debating a very important question: which is the best high school in the area. They have tried resolving this dispute in a number of ways from Science Olympiad face offs to PUSD Olympics, but something always went wrong that altered the results. After testing out competitive one day events, the PUSD Board decided this podium would be better selected as a result of all around statistics. With bragging rights on the line, the District Board decided that leaving this decision up to the biased campus leaders would be too confusing. For this reason, the Board selected 11 representative judges from around the district to make a nonpartisan decision on the matter.
The majority opinion regarding this essential question has ebbed and flowed over the recent years. Each school has acquired great success in the athletic realm, making it difficult to compare the campuses based on a simple sports scoring system. The judges have looked at overall test scores and attendance records, but the data is much too complex to come to a valid conclusion. PUSD community members have been eagerly searching for a competition category that could simplify this process and it seems that the most recent global crisis has provided the perfect opportunity.
“Collectively, PUSD highschool administrators and district supervisors have been working extremely hard to finalize the podium standings, and it seems that after 20 years, we’ve finally done it,” PUSD superintendent Ima Biased said.
With the COVID-19 pandemic still actively on people’s brains, the PUSD leaders decided to create a scoring system based on the number of campus cases, ultimately putting MC in the gold medal position. The judges considered the number of reported cases each school had and out of the entire district, the final report issued on January 13th put MC in the lead with 146 cases, Del Norte in second with 115, and Poway in third with 84. The judges also took into account the number of masks available at the front gate for students to take as well as the overall “cuteness of masks in use.”
“Some community members were confused about the third category wondering how attractiveness of masks relates to the issue, but as a group, we decided that having nice-looking masks overall promotes their use,” PUSD lead competition judge John Partisany said. “We saw some nice green masks at Poway and a couple Nighthawk-inspired ones at Del Norte, but none of them could top MC Dance Troupe’s matching Sundevil masks that ultimately encouraged the rest of the campus to not only amp up school spirit, but also promote mask wearing.”
Many PUSD students and faculty members were additionally confused by the main scoring category, wondering why MC took gold because they had the most cases when, as one Rancho Bernardo student put it, “that seems #notgood and #unsafe.”
The PUSD judges confirmed MC principal Greg Pineapple’s explanation of the situation.
“Here at Mt. Carmel, we are 100% committed to ensuring the safety of not only our students, but of every other community member. It is true, we currently have the most COVID-19 cases in the district, but instead of paying attention to the negativity surrounding this incident, we always resort to the Sundevil Way and the enforcement of positive energy. With almost 78% of our student body fully vaccinated [data taken from an MC Sun survey in September], the spread of this disease is pushing us towards herd immunity and the overall digression of this issue. Such statistics show that we as a school are moving closer to healthy living at a faster rate than any other PUSD campus. Stay safe students and remember, it’s great to be a Sundevil,” Pineapple said on the Sundevil Broadcast on Thursday.
After careful consideration, the judges decided to finally put an end to this everlasting debate by granting MC the title of Best PUSD High School. The campus is full of great spirit, as evident in their consecutive Battle of the Fans victories and Red Sea spirit, as well as, apparently, lots of germs. Regardless, the school is made up of numerous highly intellectual students such as those learning about alpha and beta in AP Calculus class and contracting Delta in the cafeteria or the ones passing their AP Chemistry exams in the morning and their COVID-19 tests in the afternoon. Thanks to MC’s spread of joy and Omicron, they will go down in history as PUSD’s number one high school. Way to go Sundevils!
