On March 15, 2025, national security leaders mistakenly included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in a group chat discussing plans for military strikes in Yemen. The mistake was immortalized in an article published in The Atlantic titled, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” Weeks later, an even more shocking breach occurred: the Pali administration accidentally texted me its Sears plans.
This is going to require some explaining.
Pali has long been regarded as the paragon of education, ever since implementing widely applauded measures like banning phones and distributing Lenovos. But the messages I read in the group chat between Dr. Magee, Dewey the Dolphin and other Pali administrators detailed a plan so revolutionary, it trumped even those bold measures. What initially appeared as a desperate scramble to house students after the fire was, in fact, a brilliant, strategic move on behalf of our Pali administration.
In their English classes, students can draw from personal experiences attempting to brave the stairs of Sears to draw parallels to the novel “Lord of the Flies.” As Magee pointed out: “Why analyze civilization’s collapse when you can live it between periods?” This is the first step to beating the test scores of Pali’s bitter academic rivals: Granada, Harvard Westlake and Harvard University.
Students in AP Psychology can now experience phenomena they had only previously read about in their textbooks like group panic, paranoia and fight-or-flight. Lessons on the Stanford Prison Experiment have been canceled on the grounds that the basement during passing periods provides sufficient coverage.
After last year’s poor sports seasons, Pali South will improve athletics. Pali’s PE program has been fully integrated into the architectural design. “The maze-like layout with built-in Treadmasters is already producing D1-ready reflexes,” Dewey noted. Attempting to walk up the main staircase during a passing period fulfills a semester of PE credit requirements.
To the untrained eye, cramming thousands of teenagers into an abandoned department store looks like chaos. To Pali administrators, it looks like the future of education. Sure, students may leave Pali traumatized, with spirits crushed and ACLs torn. But they’ll also leave with the strongest “overcoming adversity” essays the Common Application has ever seen. And isn’t that what education is all about?
Truly, the plan is fire. I mean…great.