Illustration by Jeff Drew

Facebook Buys Eugene School District

‘It’s time to make education pay for itself,’ Zuckerberg says

The Eugene School District announced this week that it’s been acquired by tech giant Facebook, making the once-public district the first in the nation to be entirely privatized by Silicon Valley.

“We look forward to bringing exciting new learning opportunities to the children of Eugene,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post announcing the sale. “We’re going to be instituting an entirely new program called Self-Education that’s Relevant For the 21st Century (SERF21).”

Under the deal, which closes April 1, all children enrolled in the district will take part in an innovative program that will be run at the district’s former high school, middle school and elementary school campuses. Reporting financial terms of the acquisition is illegal under Oregon’s new Google-Oregon Public Records law (GOP Records).

The district’s students will gain valuable hands-on experience in such fields as call-center operation, shipping and receiving, data entry and fiber optic installation.

Advanced high school students will be eligible for certification in the fields of targeted advertising, data surveillance and vote tampering.

In an exclusive interview with Eugene Guillotine, Zuckerberg says the district’s foreign language offerings will also be considerably enhanced.

“Our new Russian-language program will allow top students to study abroad in Moscow and return home with advanced business, language and cultural skills,” he says.

Teachers, administrators and other former employees of the district will be given the option to purchase Facebook stock at a discount in place of other compensation. They will also be invited to re-apply for contract jobs that no longer involve the wasteful drudgery of meeting students in classrooms.

As part of the purchase, the Oregon Legislature — soon to be renamed the Amazon Prime Legislative Hub (NYSE:AMPLE) — has pushed through an emergency bill canceling all PERS benefits for former 4J employees.

“This will be a completely non-elite school system,” Zuckerberg says. “We plan on eliminating patriarchal titles such as ‘teacher’ and ‘principal.’ From now on, everyone — teacher and student alike — will be addressed by the same title, ‘intern.’”

Schools will be rebranded as “advanced data centers,” he said, reflecting their more-functional status in the global economy.

Zuckerberg canceled previously announced plans to buy the University of Oregon after discovering the institution is already privately owned.

“There are limits to what even Facebook can accomplish,” he said. ■