Welcome Back to School! Here are 10,567 Emails For Your First Day!

And please don't lose the slip of paper with the QR code we taped to your child!

Hi everyone! Welcome to your first day of school! To get us started, here are 10,567 emails. Inside some of them you’ll find PDFs, Google links, and some with Slide Shows! There are also spreadsheets and tables for you to add your names to them! Please read them all, including the small print on the third page with details for how to put together a PowerPoint presentation about Your Child’s Summer Vacation! We will be sharing it in our classroom together on the first day.

We will need you to download an app for the school dismissal system. Please tell us how you will be getting your child to school! Here is the new driving map, which has changed from last year. If your license plate starts with the letters A through K, your new drop-off line for cars now goes behind the school and across the tennis courts. If your license plate has odd numbers, we would like you to wait on the football field. Please don’t drive too hard, we need to maintain a pristine field! Even when it’s a parking lot. Please do not drive across the basketball court as we are re-paving it and your car will probably get stuck in the fresh asphalt!

If you are sending your child on the bus, we have good news! We have enough bus drivers this year for at least half of your children! The bus will pick up your child as long as you figure out how to log into the app. This can take up to ten minutes. Do remember what color bus your child is on. **This is important.** But please also be prepared to drive them to school if we don’t have enough bus drivers! If there are no more bus drivers available that morning, you will be driving your child to school! We recommend never scheduling any meetings before 10 a.m. for ease of the drop-off transition.

Please encourage your older children to walk to school! That way we can reduce the number of cars on the tennis courts, and save space on the buses! But please be careful, as there are no sidewalks, so please teach your children how to walk in the road safely. We recommend you walk them to school wearing brightly colored vests!

Oh also, there are a few more apps you’ll need to download for music, gym, library, technology, and the use of the printer! None of the apps work together, and they are all rated 2-stars or fewer and frequently crash because we have no budget, sorry about that! Please also note that your child is limited to one sheet of paper per day!  

As you get adjusted to back-to-school systems, do note that we operate on a week that is six days long, and doesn’t match any other calendar you use! You’ll need to log into the school website so you know what day of the week it is!

Your elementary children who are ages five to seven years old can arrive at school between 8:20 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. but cannot arrive earlier than 8:15 a.m. For those of you with siblings, please note that any elementary children who are eight years and older can only arrive at school between 8:35 a.m. and 8:50 a.m. Please have them walk to school on their own if they can! But do not form a crowd outside the school for too long. Also, the staggered start is good for children! You will now get to spend an hour each day getting two children to school, which should be great quality time.

On the days that school is dismissed early at 10:45 a.m., you will get to spend two hours driving for two hours of classroom time. Don’t worry, we will feed them a snack, but please remember there is no lunch on early dismissal days! Enjoy your coffee hour And speaking of lunches, your child will get a five-digit code to access the school lunch system. Please have them memorize this code and practice punching it in.

Don’t lose the piece of paper your child came home with! It is a very tiny slip of paper, because we used one piece of paper to print them all. On this slip of paper is your secret QR code for the app. Which app? That’s a mystery, because we didn't have enough space to put it on the paper! Check your email for the instructions! They are inside of a PDF attachment on the last page! It is not searchable, so good luck! Please note that if you lose it, we can’t print it, because we only use fax machines. 

One last thing, we also need you to bring in six boxes of Kleenex, four cartons of water, and the entire aisle of school supplies from Walgreens. We also need a framed photograph of your family for your child’s cubby. And please label everything that is not permanently attached to your child! You can also label your child! If you’d like to get tattoos made of your QR code, you can apply them to your child each week. They can use them in the lunch line if they forget their unique ID number.

Good luck everyone! We’re so excited to teach your child! And don’t forget that school gets out at 2:20 p.m. for the small children and 3:05 p.m. for the older children, except Wednesdays, when school gets out at 1:40 p.m. for everyone, and we will be sending out a new driving map for Wednesday’s special pickup routine when every parent arrives at school at the same time!

PS: The PTSA will be reaching out next week with our fundraisers and to get all of you onto a volunteer slot!

PPS: Don’t forget that Spirit Week is coming up!

— Sarah Peck

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I hope you all are surviving the back-to-school era. It’s a crush of paperwork and forms and schedules and tiny details. I posted a shorter version of this on my LinkedIn page, and a teacher wrote back, “I'm a teacher and I'd like you to know that I have no idea where the piece of paper is either.” and I about died with laughter.

Please know this: I love teachers. And school. And childcare. The teachers work SO HARD. The budget is not enough. I am happy to bring the entire aisle of school supplies for you, and scavenge the free websites for new classroom bookshelves or containers. Thank you for all the work you do.

It’s the chaos of all of it that is mind-boggling. I know you get it.

The back-to-school struggle bus is real.