SATIRE: Hilliard City Schools to Replace Paper with ePaper

A Satire by Eli Lambrych ’23

Earlier this week, Hilliard City Schools officially announced that during the 2022-2023 Hilliard Schools will start to replace paper with ePaper, an electronic form of paper.

“I know this change might be bizarre, but there’s an actual reason behind this decision: using normal, non-electric paper is just so gosh darn expensive!” said a spokesperson for HCSD, “Plus there are like, so many economic benefits, it’s totally worth your tax dollars!”

Developed as a collaboration project between engineering students in all three high schools over the past school year, Davidson, Darby, and Bradley have created the ePaper devices that HCSD will be transitioning to throughout this upcoming summer.

“Despite our schools’ differences, it’s like a great way to have students collaborate and develop schools that even some colleges don’t even offer,” says Hilliard Darby senior Flora Bernal.

However, this proprietary form has had to cut some costs to keep it economically viable. For instance, the ePaper tablets have no charging port, meaning that battery lifetime will be limited to around two years. Additionally, photocopiers and printers will also need to be replaced with ePaper-specific versions, and styluses have to be paired to each eTablet device in order to write on them. 

“I think that this is a great change,” says HDV freshman Shaunie Aguilar, “even though there are a lot of things that might make using these ePaper things more difficult than normal pieces of paper, we’re already used to these problems since we’ve been using iPads and computers for our entire lives.” 

However, there are a few people opposed to these changes. According to HDV teacher Nancy Holman, “These new ePaper things mean that all of our old papers are worthless. Now we gotta scan countless documents to digitize them!”

However, since no paper products are required to make the ePaper devices, we may see a noticeable impact on the reduction of trees being cut down if other school districts and companies start adopting them, leading to a better environmental impact overall.