school dazed

I expected this week to be frantic, but I didn’t expect it to be so messy. Oof. A quick roundup of what’s been up over here via middle school edition of the Friday Five.

 

One: Team / Class Assignment Day

In preparation for the school year to begin, we usually receive homeroom/team assignments the middle Friday in August followed by class schedules in the parent app the following week. This is quite the stressful day for Lil Momma; she has never ended up on a team with a friend and it’s always a lot of feelings, made more feelingsful this year because of the move to middle school. The assignments were supposed to come out at 5pm. My plan was to pick LM up from YMCA camp at 3:45, go get dessert first, and then to navigate the feelings together as the Mr. and I checked each team’s post on social media for friends in her classes (or, as is the way with tweens, frenemies and nemeses, too).

 

BUT, PLOT TWIST: the email came out at 3pm! The Mr. and I jumped on the posts while our phones blew up – LM had 5 of her close friend group on her team and 3 of them in her homeroom! The rest of the afternoon was a blur of her excitement and hopes that she and her friends had team classes together which we’d find out at orientation a week and a half later when they’d get to walk their scheduled.

 

Two: Surprise Assignment Day

It seemed weird that we didn’t receive schedules during the week between assignments and orientation, but we all figured it was a glitch with the app. We even got an email letting us know that they’d have paper copies of their schedules at orientation if the app didn’t get updated.

 

PLOT TWIST: When I randomly checked my email the following Friday afternoon, there was an email from the principal explaining that something had gone wrong with assignments (over 100 kids had accidentally been left out by the program) and that they had to redo them for a number of kids. My heart dropped. Of course, LM had been moved to another team. Once again, our texts and parent board pages blew up. Luckly, LM had a couple of friends on her new team. Not as luckily, we still didn’t see schedules in the parent app so we had no idea if she had classes with anyone.

 

Three: Orientation

In the days before orientation, we received a few emails with hopes of having schedules before the event, but then the admittance that it wasn’t going to happen. Where “walking their schedules” was the whole point of the event, this was a bit of a meh moment. LM went with a friend and picked up their agenda books and then walked down to their homerooms (which are across the hall from each other – a real sigh of relief for me as they’d be walking to and from that friend’s house).

 

Four: First Day of School

This was this week! LM walked off with her friends (and I tracked her on my phone) and thus middle school began. I headed into work and the Mr. went to pick her up after school. Before I left work, I saw a flurry of posts on social media talking about how there weren’t enough chairs in some classes and kids were sitting on the floors and cabinets. I checked in with LM once I got home and, ugh, learned that the teams and classes were all messed up. On LM’s team, there were way too many kids and the overflow (aka those who arrived last) ended up on the floor or being sent back to a class they’d already taken because there was “room”. On the other teams, there were super tiny classes (10 kids). So, it was no surprise that the teachers let them know that teams would be changed again for some (but not when).

 

Five: Friday

I head out in an hour to go grab LM from walking back from school. I have no idea how or when this all gets worked out, sigh. I am super proud of my girl for having a good mindset about it, even if the idea of changing teams again bums her out. Hopefully, we get an email from the administration that lets us know the plan. (Please, let there be a plan).

 

As for this weekend, LM is putting on her brave pants to audition for Elf the musical and then is seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for a friend’s birthday. I have high hopes of getting my calendar done - it’s a seasonal one that moves from next week through Christmas – and working on my avoidable things I’m trying to power through in September.

 

Thanks for listening to our school drama, haha! Have you ever had a wild start to the school year – or have the kids in your life?