This past Wednesday, March 22nd, ASB joined together with CCHS club leaders to host the Club Carnival. The carnival is focused on giving clubs the opportunity to raise money for their future activities. Clubs sold popular food items such as Canes, Chick-Fil-A, Jamba Juice, Crumbl, and more. ASB planned activities for students to enjoy, such as the petting zoo, bubble soccer, dunk tank, and bouncy houses. Our classes were cut short to 70 minutes, leaving us a little over an hour to enjoy the carnival. As you can see, the carnival took a lot of planning, money, and time. But no matter how much ASB hyped up the carnival, CCHS students were still choosing to leave early. Why?

After meeting with CCHS’ Attendance Assistant, Mrs. Corpuz- Bui, it was revealed that about 160 students left school on the day of the carnival. She stated that there were a couple of students that were “not nice” in regards to not being able to leave campus. At 12:55 pm on the day of the carnival, the attendance office door was locked.

“They did something new because last year was a mess.” The intent behind this change in attendance, according to Mrs. Corpuz-Bui, was “to avoid the situation that happened last year where we literally had almost two hundred kids in the office trying to get passports.” Last year, parents had to call into the office to get their student released so one can imagine the stress the office was under when they were getting hundreds of calls at once from parents trying to get their child out of the Club Carnival.

Anger from students who were not allowed to leave flooded the school. Many students complained that they felt like they were imprisoned in the school. When asking senior, Peighton Mulvaney, how she felt about not being able to leave when she felt sick, she states, “I felt trapped, really annoyed, and panicked because I knew that I did not feel well and needed to go home and rest…I felt bad for the nurses because they were saying students were getting angry with them but it was not in their control. They would get in trouble with the deans if they let the students leave.”

According to Nurse Spooner, “There were kids that were trying to get out for medical reasons and doctor’s appointments, so we started telling students they needed to show confirmation of their doctor’s appointment in order to get released.”

Although parents could not predict if their students would be sick enough to go home from school, Principal Conroy sent out an email to parents and students, informing them that if their student needed to leave on March 22nd, they had to fill out the passport application by Tuesday, March 21st. This was made clear in many emails prior to the event. The school’s intent was not evil, trying to trap kids inside, yet many students felt this way. The intent was to make the big event, which took weeks to plan, inclusive to every student.

Nurse Spooner goes on to say that she believes students wanted to leave the carnival so badly because, “some of them don’t find the importance in community building or they are not interested in joining clubs, so they have their own priorities that they were focusing on.”

Now the question arises: Do CCHS students take school events for granted? At many public schools, club carnivals are during lunch for clubs to sell food, but not at the variety that CCHS does. Students are valuing the work and love CCHS is putting into events, such as the carnival, too lightly. These events are meant to increase school spirit and morale, but how can CCHS do that if students are choosing to purposefully not participate?

The Club Carnival has a domino effect. CCHS Students buy tickets to buy food. Each club collects tickets that turn into money they can use in the future. Clubs such as Hearts of Cathedral, use the money they raise in events such as these to provide low-income schools with AEDs and volunteer where they are needed. Students who bought Panda Express last Wednesday contributed to their cause. When playing bubble soccer with their friends or petting the pigs and bunnies at the petting zoo, students created memories that will be remembered when thinking of their high school years down the road. Because seriously, what other school brings an alpaca onto campus for fun?!