Why I Hate the End of the School Year (And What I Do To Make It Easier For My Kids)
I’m leaning against my dented minivan, a half-melted cherry popsicle dripping down my wrist, when the final bell rings for the day. Mia, my 4th grader, comes barrelling out before the first group of kids even clears the door, crumpling a slip of paper in her fist, tripping over the curb by the bike rack. Her sweatshirt has a hole at the elbow from when she fell off her scooter last month, and snot is already running down her upper lip before she even reaches me.
The slip is her 5th grade class assignment. Her best friend Lila is in a different homeroom. Her favorite teacher, Ms. Henderson, is moving down to the 1st grade wing next year. The class hamster, Mr. Nibbles, is retiring to the office and won’t be in any classroom next fall. “Everything’s ending,” she says, and bursts into sobs against my shoulder. I pat her back and glance at the other parents laughing by their cars, counting down the days until summer break, and I think the same thing I think every year this time: I hate the end of the school year.
I didn’t always name it out loud. Two years ago, when my oldest son Jax was in 7th grade, I spent a whole two weeks convinced he was just being lazy and rude. He’d forgotten his math textbook three days in a row, got sent to the office for tossing a paper airplane across the classroom (something he’d never done before), and snapped at me when I asked how his end-of-year field trip went. I took away his Xbox, nagged him about finishing his final projects, and we fought every night at dinner. Then I went up to his room to tell him it was bedtime, and found him cross-legged on the floor, all his old elementary yearbooks spread out across the comforter, crying quiet into his pillow. His favorite 5th grade teacher, the one who’d stayed after school to help him learn his multiplication tables when he was struggling, was leaving the district at the end of the year, and Jax never got a chance to say goodbye. That’s when I realized all the chaos we go through this time of year isn’t just bad behavior or pre-summer restlessness. It’s loss. All the small, steady routines that make a kid feel safe are wrapped up in their school year, and they all get torn away in two weeks. No one talks about that, because everyone’s too busy planning pool days and vacation barbecues.
After that, I stopped trying to push past the sadness and started doing small, simple things to make it easier. The first thing I changed was what I say. I don’t tell Mia “you’ll make new friends” or “you’ll love your new teacher” or “just be excited for summer” anymore. When she says she’s sad Ms. Henderson won’t be her teacher, I just say “that sucks. It’s okay to be sad about that.” It sounds small, but it’s a million times more helpful than trying to cheer her up immediately. Last week, when Jax said he was upset that his high school orientation is already next month and he’ll never eat lunch in the 8th grade cafeteria again, I just said that line, and he sat next to me on the porch for 10 minutes talking about the time his friend spilled a whole slushie on his math notebook, and that was it. He didn’t need a solution, he just needed me to not tell him his feelings were silly.
The other thing we do every year is what we call “save three.” Every end of the year, kids bring home stacks of drawings, dioramas, worksheets covered in stickers, and flyers from field trips. If you keep everything, your attic becomes a fire hazard of craft supplies. If you throw everything away, you’re throwing away things that matter to them. So after dinner one night the week before school ends, we sit on the living room floor for 15 minutes, and each kid picks three things from the whole year that mean the most to them. Mia picked her rainforest diorama (made from my old running shoe box) last year, a note Ms. Henderson wrote her, and an acorn she and Lila found on the playground. We put those three things in a labeled shoebox that goes on the shelf in their closet, and I take photos of everything else to add to a digital album labeled with their grade and year. No fancy scrapbooking, no hours of work, just 15 minutes.
If they’re really upset about saying goodbye to a teacher or a friend, we do a low-key goodbye. We stop at the dollar store on the way home, they pick out a $2 pack of stickers or a lemon lollipop, and write a two-sentence note. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Mia’s note to Ms. Henderson last year just said “thank you for letting me feed Mr. Nibbles every Friday.” That’s it. It gives them a chance to close the loop instead of letting that unsaid feeling sit heavy. If they’re nervous about the new class, we stop by the school a week before the first day of next year, walk past the new classroom, and just peek in the window if it’s open. We don’t force a meeting with the teacher or a big tour. We just point out where the drinking fountain is, where the bathroom is, and leave. It takes 5 minutes, and it takes a lot of the unknown edge off for them.
Today, after we got home, Mia was still sad. I still had a work email to answer and a load of laundry to pull out of the dryer, so I told her I needed 20 minutes before we could do anything, and that was okay. I didn’t have to drop everything to fix it. I still hate the end of the school year. I hate the meltdowns over library books and class lists, I hate that every year it reminds me how fast my kids are growing up, how all the small things they love this year will be gone by next fall. It’s never perfect. We’ve forgotten to do “save three” until the night before the last day before, we still fight about returning textbooks, some days I still snap and tell everyone I just want to get through the next two weeks. But these small things work, more often than not. They don’t make the sadness go away completely. But they let my kids know their feelings matter, even when the whole world is too busy counting down to summer to notice.
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