Editor’s Note: The piece below was published in The Weekly’s 2019 “Joke Issue.” All content, quotations, and other features are entirely fictitious. 

Emails fill the inboxes of Parker students on a daily basis. Some are from teachers. Others advertise events at the school. But an increasing number of emails are sent from high school students to all other high school students, using a feature known as the “group email.” But this feature may soon be a thing of the past.

According to technology director Peter Evans, the emails have caused a strain on the servers that Parker uses to manage its email service. “Because the group emails need to be sent to the servers and then distributed to all email address in a given group,” Evans said, “stress is put on the server, which is incapable of redistributing so many emails.”

Because of this strain, many important emails have not been sent or received due to them being backlogged on the redistribution server, located in a locked closet in the school. Evans sees two solutions to this problem. “We could buy an entire new machine dedicated to redistributing those emails,” Evans said. This solution, however, has multiple issues, including its immense cost.

Evans estimates it could be as much as $1,000,000 to buy, install, and configure a new server to deal with the email flow.
The other option is far simpler: disabling the group email feature altogether.
“Disabling it would be easy—I just have to press a few buttons, and presto, it’ll be gone,” Evans said. But while this solution is easy and free, many students, as well as teachers, are apprehensive about the idea, including freshman Audrey McNabola. “Without this feature, I’d be lost,” McNabola said. “And so would my coat!”

When McNabola left her $5,000 coat in the cafeteria, she thought it was gone forever. “I sent an email to the whole school because that’s a $5,000 coat,” McNabola said. “And a day later, someone replied to my email and said they found it!” McNabola believes that the group email feature is one that should stay.

Some students like the feature but dislike its misuse. Senior Nicky Lerner finds the group email function very useful. “As the head of the math club, I think being able to email the whole school is great,” Lerner said. “But there’s clearly some sort of issue with the email system because no one ever shows up at math club.” Lerner says that because of this he is, “forced to make an announcement at Morning Ex.” He hopes that the group email feature is kept, but only for important messages such as his math club announcements.

This issue has divided the student body more than ever. Proposals are being made in Student Government, and, during the past three weeks of Plenary, nothing has been done due to unrest and debate about the group emails.

While no decision has been made, the discussion is ongoing. The administration has voiced its approval for Evans’ proposal to disable the group email feature and not spend $1 million on a new piece of equipment. As of now, the fate of the group email function at Parker is uncertain.