Last Tuesday, Phillips Academy was forced to eradicate its spinning program when the extracurricular sport was discovered to have broken child labor laws. Although most of the enthusiastic students were attempting to partake in the popular sport of stationary cycling, in reality the program was using students to sew all of the Andover apparel on campus without pay.
An investigation led by the Chief Labor Law Enforcer on campus, Winee Dell, revealed a patchwork of sweatshops interwoven across campus. Dell discovered the illicit blue-market when she pulled a loose string on one of her Andover sweaters and the whole mystery suddenly unravelled.
“This discovery is making my head spin. We haven’t had a find like this since students got stuck spinning on the merry-go-round,” said Dell in a recent interview.
Seamingly, Abby Crombie, Head of Andover’s spinning program, strung the trustees along into finally getting on board and thinking that the spinning program was a demanding yet productive sport that cut costs by only using stationary machines and pedals.Despite the vague course description, the trustees approved the sport for yet another year.
Students’ reviews of the program were mixed. “This course was sew much work, but welcome to Andover,” said Rob Irvinoutfitters ’15. “Ms. Abby Crombie was kind of high strung.”
Apparently, students joined spinning in search of a calmer sport. “The times for spinning were so lax that I thought it would be the only sport loose-fitting enough for my schedule besides lax, which I hate,” said a student victim, C. Mstress ’16. “Still, I did get my fair share of exercise. I worked up a sweat in the shop more than once!”
This major cross-campus fabrication has sewn seeds of distrust between Chief Labor Law Enforcement Dell and all sports on campus. Dell is proposing a full-scale, XXL size investigation into all potential illicit behavior in the athletic department. If she pulls a few strings, the inspection should go off without a stitch.
“I’m talking about examining every dorm and classroom for loose threads on this mystery,” claims Dell.
As the campus laments this tapestral tragedy, we can only hope that no other issues cut from the same cloth will arise in the future.
