Well that's the thing. Unlike you I did read the article carefully. The article makes two explicit claims: (1) the timing of
emails to parents occurred after the early college application deadline, and (2) the timing of
physical distribution of certificates did as well.
However in addition to those (superfluous) notifications, the article notes that the individual students themselves received email notifications: this is the notification I referred to in my previous post. Strangely the article brushes past this point and never addresses precisely when these notifications were sent to students.
This was the part of the article I found confusing, given that the notification to students would be the most important date that determines whether a student could use the information in their college application. If the school sent emails to students' accounts, the date should be easy to verify and include in the article, but the author does not do this.
"One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement."
Indeed, zooming in on the specific claims regarding application deadlines, it's hard not to put together the following picture and observe that it is entirely compatible with the precise way the author (apparently an accomplished journalist) wrote the piece:
1. The school received the notifications in mid-October.
2. They sent out email notifications to students in a timely fashion.
3. Students failed to read these "random email notifications" because, duh, they're teenagers and don't check their school email.
4. The physical certificates (irrelevant, but a nice keepsake) took longer to distribute
5. Parents were notified only later on, and then pitched a fit about it because (unlike their kids) they do read their email.
6. The school, mollified by the parents' fury, promised to notify the parents in the future so that they could make sure their kids' inattention to email wouldn't result in further screwups.
7. An angry parent wrote an article subtitled "Why are administrators at a top-ranked public high school hiding National Merit awards from students and families?" implying (falsely) that the school deliberately withheld notification to students, and carefully cherry-picking facts to make that case.