Opaqueness: An Unexpected but Welcome Change

Ryan Zou ‘25

Today is a day of long overdue, and frankly, relieving changes at Masterman. After a compelling series of letters sent to the School District of Philadelphia from an unspecified number of anonymous Pennsylvanians who do not wish to be identified, the emphasis on the increased protection of privacy of district staff and students has triumphed over longtime neglect. The transparent windows at the Masterman building will be replaced with opaque slabs of the highest-quality steel, perforated with many tiny holes that are invisible to the naked eye to ensure ventilation.

One such Pennsylvanian, hailing from Indiana, Pennsylvania, is overjoyed at the district’s willingness to listen to community concerns and step up the protection they and their family have been advocating for some amount of years in a neighborhood of no relevance whatsoever to this article. However, they express worry that the updated windows may not be enough to remedy the situation. “In such a technologically advanced time, we must stop at nothing to provide a strong line of defense against delinquents armed with all sorts of newfangled gadgets. Especially them Pittsburgh folk trying to get early intel on our city’s future athletic stars. Those darn fools! They most [sic] be spying on our children!” (By way of background, Indiana is a core suburb of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area’s athletic patrimony, though also famous for its majority denial of the existence of trees.)

An unquantifiable number of parents were invited to attend a feedback forum, and in the transcript, they can be quoted expressing their gratitude for this monumental change: “I’m so thankful that the District has reached an agreement with us. From when my kids started attending [REDACTED] School in the School District of [REDACTED], I knew immediately that something had to be done to stop nosy Philadelphians from infringing on our children’s rights to privacy. I believe that with this first change that Philly is headed in the right direction.”

More changes are to come at Masterman, and, in an act to uphold the virtues of democracy, the School District is opening up to previously unaddressed opinions of less than twenty-three demographics that we are not permitted to name, ergo, exclusively considering the voices of students, teachers, parents, and staff is non-inclusive and biased.

In the coming months, more guarantees of privacy can be expected, tentatively including a plan to paperize the gradebook and morning entry to the building. The unpopular and unsafe “swiping in” will be replaced with a sign-in binder after students pass through the metal detector and bag scanner. Teachers will be required to grade students on paper and mail each student’s grade sheet to the School District’s primary building at the end of every interim period and every quarter.

More changes are foreseen: each student will receive a unique schedule, which will also be expanded to include Saturdays. Under this new model, each of the six school days will have a different order of classes and the schedules will be named using the letter system from A to F. Each week, the schedules of every student will be randomized, and only the student’s family will receive weekly roster updates in the mail (for example, it could be an A day for John Doe, but it is simultaneously an E day for Jane Smith). All of these changes are designed to combat the rising threat of nouveaux-pirates (a general term for hackers armed with artificial intelligence), and the scheduling changes (unique to Masterman when in the scope of the whole District) will be made to target allegations of privacy violations during the duration of Blammo. The exact dates that changes will be implemented will simply not be disclosed.

With a bright future ahead of the District’s privacy guidelines and significantly less-bright windows, we will welcome a new era of unprecedented security.