Following a “resounding success” during a fire drill at New Trier High School, “a mere fifty percent” of all participating students have been officially reported as missing per the school’s administration.
The news comes after a lockdown drill, fire drill, and severe weather drill were all implemented at the same time as a part of “ongoing improvements to campus readiness and student safety.”
In the aftermath of the drill, the administration of New Trier Superintendent Don McMafun has closed ranks and defended embattled Minister of Campus Security and Internal Affairs, Dr. Sally Sogart, who has recently come under intense scrutiny for her repeated appearance in the flight logs of disgraced Winnetka financier Gerald Winters.
McMafun downplayed the emergency that the missing students represented. “These students are merely temporarily off-campus learners,” McMafun explained. “They are simply engaging in a long-standing New Trier tradition of independent learning and a non-restrictive learning environment.”
Dr. Steven Larking, a spokesperson for the New Trier Society of Parental Success and Child Development (NTSPSCD), expressed severe concerns that their students being missing could “have profoundly negative implications on my child’s eventual application to Yale; it is exceedingly difficult for applicants to explain significant gaps in their academic resume, so the disappearance of my firstborn son is simply inexcusable.”
School administrators have repeatedly emphasized that the drill’s “slightly unexpected outcomes” only served to demonstrate the significant resilience of New Trier’s community. According to an internal memo accidentally CC’d to several confused sophomores, the simultaneous activation of all three of the school’s emergency protocols was pre-planned months in advance and carefully designed for maximum “stress inoculation” in students. Allegedly, the overlapping drills were intended to “prepare students for the stresses of the real world, like University of Michigan deferrals or group projects.”
Students caught in the drill, who did not mysteriously vanish, report hearing a barrage of contradictory and even downright unhelpful directions over the PA system during the drill. Various students report hearing instructions to “leave the building immediately,” “find a safe space immediately,” and to “take shelter in the hallways or other windowless spaces,” all within the span of a few moments. New Trier administrators vigorously dispute these student accounts and recall only hearing “clear, concise, and complete directions” that “clearly communicated the standard responses to drills.”
As the number of missing students continued to rise, New Trier administrators moved to dispute the number of students counted as missing. Citing the NTHS student handbook of 1642, administrators argued that students only counted as missing if they were entirely unreachable for a period of more than five years or were confirmed to be killed in action whilst fighting in the English Civil War, reducing the missing student population to 12% of all New Trier students. Administrators have confirmed that “all temporarily off-campus learners remain on track academically.”
