Isn't that more or less what they did? Having a couple of grad students compute exactly what shifting high school later without costing a lot of extra money sounds sort of like the definition of exploring what the change would look like.

ADDED: To be fair, they did try to take the results and try to run with them. It seems as if there would have been less of an issue had they taken the results and did more outreach to find if this was a change parents were actually OK with.