How Involving Parents Makes a Mid-Year Move Easier: A Teacher’s Practical Tips
It was 9:17 on a Tuesday morning, and Lila had hidden under her desk for the third time that week. Her rain boots, still caked with mud from the apartment complex playground her family was leaving, stuck out from under the scuffed particleboard, and I could hear her sniffling into the sleeve of her sparkly unicorn hoodie. Her mom had emailed me the Friday before, 10 sentences typed fast between dental patient check-ins, to say they were moving 45 minutes across the city at the end of the month, that Lila would be switching schools, and she didn’t know how to break the news without weeks of meltdowns. She’d already packed most of Lila’s books and stuffed animals after she fell asleep, she wrote, because she didn’t want her dragging her feet or pulling everything back out to play.
I got down on the floor, didn’t try to coax her out right away, and sat cross-legged on the rug next to the desk. I passed her a sheet of puffy stickers I keep for scraped knees and bad quiz days, and after a minute, her hand snuck out to grab it. She mumbled that she didn’t want to leave Mia, her table partner. She didn’t want the new basement to have spiders. She didn’t want to leave Bubbles, our class goldfish who’d eaten half a plastic plant earlier that semester.
Early in my eight years teaching second grade, I would’ve handled this whole thing on my own. I’d plan a going-away memory book, pair her with a favorite buddy for her last week, send a quick intro email to the new second grade teacher, and call it done. I figured parents already had enough on their plates with lease signings and utility transfers and coordinating moving trucks, and adding another school-related task would just stress them out more. It took a student named Javi, who moved halfway through the year before Lila, to make me rethink that. Three months after he left, his mom sent me a long, tired email saying he was still having daytime accidents at his new school, refused to talk about our class, and kept sneaking his old class t-shirt to bed with him. I’d sent home a generic going-away card with him, but I’d never once talked to her about what we were doing to process the move, or asked what life looked like at home in the middle of packing. We were both trying to help him, but we were working off totally different scripts.
I called Lila’s mom after school that day, instead of firing off a long email. I knew she couldn’t take personal calls during her shift, so I left a quick voice mail first saying I didn’t need a formal meeting or any extra supplies, I just had two tiny, five-minute asks that would probably cut down on the under-desk time. She called me back 10 minutes later, during her smoke break, and laughed when I told her why I was calling. She said she’d been bracing for a complaint about Lila acting out, that she felt like she was already messing this up. She was handling most of the move alone; Lila’s dad worked construction out of state and only came home one weekend a month, and she’d avoided telling him how upset Lila was because she didn’t want him to worry or take time off he couldn’t afford.
I told her what we were working on in class that week: a moving map, a big sheet of construction paper where kids who are leaving draw our school, the route to their new place, and mark spots they know or want to visit. Instead of just doing that at school, I asked if she could pull up Google Street View on her phone one night after dinner, and let Lila click around the new school’s playground, their new bus stop, and the donut shop the realtor had mentioned was two minutes from their new apartment. It didn’t have to be a long talk, I said. Just 10 minutes, no packing allowed during that time. The other ask: let Lila pack her own box of special things, even if she unpacks and rearranges it 10 times. She could keep that box with her in the car instead of the moving truck, so it never got lost.
I also suggested that when Lila’s dad called for their nightly face time, they prop the phone up on a moving box while she packed, and let her show him every single thing she put in the box. He didn’t have to fix anything or fly home early, I said. He just had to name one thing he was excited to do when he visited the new house, like hang the basketball hoop he’d promised her for Christmas. She said that sounded easy enough; she’d been planning to pack all that stuff herself to save time.
That Thursday, Lila showed up to class with a crumpled printout of the Street View screenshot of the new playground, and taped it to the edge of her desk. She chattered to Mia for 20 minutes about how the twist slide was way bigger than the one at our school, and they planned a playdate at a park halfway between the two neighborhoods for two weekends later. Her mom texted me a blurry photo that night: Lila cross-legged on the living room carpet, surrounded by stuffed animals and Junie B. Jones books, her box covered in glitter stickers, her dad’s face grinning from a phone propped on a stack of dish towels.
At circle time that week, we did something I started after Javi: we let every kid in class ask Lila one question about the move. I used to steer conversations away from the move because I didn’t want anyone to say something that made her sad, but it turns out kids have all the tiny, specific worries no adult thinks to name. They asked if her new house had a bathtub instead of a shower. If she got to keep her old backpack. If the toilet flushed loud. If she could still bring peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. Lila didn’t know the answer to half of them, so I scribbled all the questions down on a half-sheet of lined paper and tucked it in her take-home folder, no fancy email or follow-up form required. Her mom told me later they went through the whole list over frozen pepperoni pizza that night, and even the toilet question made Lila relax, because it turned out she’d been worrying about that for two weeks and hadn’t said a word.
For her last day, I didn’t plan the party on my own. I asked her mom if she wanted to send in Lila’s favorite snack to share, instead of me picking generic sugar cookies from the grocery store. She sent in those individual gummy fruit cups Lila always brought in for her birthday, and Lila’s dad sent a 30-second video from his work site, wearing his hard hat, thanking the class for being nice to his kid and saying he hoped he got to meet all of us sometime. We played it after snack, and the whole class waved at the screen. The day wasn’t perfect, of course. She cried for 10 minutes when she hugged Mia goodbye, she left her memory book on her desk and I had to run it out to the parking lot, and the moving truck was 45 minutes late so her mom was snapping at the dispatcher on the phone while they loaded the last of the boxes.
I think a lot of the time, adults treat a family move like a logistical checklist to get through as fast as possible. Pack the boxes, change the address, register for school, get back to normal. As a teacher, I used to buy into that too, and I thought involving parents meant dumping more work on people who were already stretched too thin. But what I’ve learned is that most parents don’t need fancy advice or big counseling sessions to help their kid through a move. They just need specific, tiny things they can do that line up with what their kid is already feeling, instead of guessing. And involving both parents, even if one lives out of state or works two jobs or doesn’t make it to school drop-off, doesn’t require a big formal meeting. It can be a 30-second video, a voice note with one question, a phone propped up on a moving box while a kid packs her stuffed animals. Kids don’t care if the move goes perfectly. They care that both of their grown-ups know about the tiny, stupid, important worries, like loud toilets and class goldfish and twist slides.
It’s been three months since Lila left. She sends the class a crayon drawing every couple of weeks, usually featuring her new tabby cat and the basketball hoop her dad put up on his last visit. Her mom emailed me last week to say some mornings are still hard: Lila will drag her feet getting dressed and say she misses our class’s Friday popcorn, that she doesn’t want to go to her new school. Last month she had a whole week where she slept with her old class photo under her pillow. But she hasn’t hidden under a desk once, and she’s made two friends who live two doors down, and last week she brought her new class goldfish (theirs is named Bubbles too) for show and tell. Her dad still only makes it home once a month, but he always asks for a face time tour of whatever new drawing or rock or stuffed animal she’s added to her bedroom shelf. It’s not a perfect fix, and there are still hard days. But for now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How Involving Parents Makes a Mid-Year Move Easier: A Teacher’s Practical Tips