by Holly Cuozzo ‘12

Also known as “Spring Fever,” “Laziness,” and “H1-N2,” Senioritis is an epidemic that is quickly infecting students of all ages.  In MCPS, Sherwood is the most infected school with a whopping 97.6 percent of students suffering from this highly contagious disease. 

“Every day, I see more and more students in here simply sick as dogs.  We have had to expand the office, putting a trailer outside for the critically ill students to be quarantined so as to not infect the rest of the students, but we still have reason to believe that the epidemic is spreading rapidly,” said Joseph Peterson, a nurse called in from Montgomery General Hospital help the school deal with the epidemic.

Senioritis has school officials on constant lookout for infected students. The known symptoms of Senioritis are head-to-toe sweat, wearing a blank expression during classes, excessive coughing, aloofness, lack of incentive to get to class on time and fainting.  The disease lasts from four days to 12 weeks, depending on the length of time that the victim goes untreated.

“I’ve already seen so many of my friends just collapse in the hallway as I’m just saying hello to them.  It’s really unfortunate, though, because we just started a series of Hangman games in our AP Language class and now we only have two people left in class who can play,” said junior Kelly Ferguson.

Clearly, the disease affects many students in a significant way.  But what worries school officials the most is that students continue to attend school even when they are infected. 

“We are trying as hard as we possibly can to get students to go home and stay home, but they just keep coming back to school, and thus back to the trailer.  We don’t know why they won’t stay away,” said Peterson. 

The new trailer placed outside has become so popular among students that it was recently unofficially named “The Bubble.”  However, the new worry is that students may be going there when they are well just to spend time with their ill friends.

“The Bubble is the hottest hangout in all of Olney now.  I’ve gone there every day for the past few weeks, and now my only problem is that I can’t seem to get myself out of bed and to class every day.  In fact, yesterday I thought I was going to faint!  But, I just shook it off.  Exams are coming up soon anyways, so I’m just going to tough out these last few days here,” said sophomore Fred Layhill.

However, Senioritis could have even more in store for the Sherwood area. Montgomery General Hospital is currently overflowing with teenagers who have been “slacking off” during school hours and thus an alarming number of infected students remain in schools with the illness. Olney is said to be going into quarantine if the epidemic is not put to rest by June 16. 

“This is a very serious problem and we are trying to deal with it as soon as possible, but if the H1-N2 disease continues to spread this rapidly, we will have no choice but to shut down the entire cluster of schools,” said MCPS official Oliver Stewart.