A Prayer for a New School Year
New school year, work your magic.
Bring on the perfectly plaited braids and buns topped with bows, the toothy, spitty smiles, the crinkly corners of eyes. Stuff our souls with smushed sandwiches and sloshing squares of purple juice.
Unearth those adorable, dorky chalkboards. Age: 6. Grade: 1. Favorite food: Noodles. Cupcakes. Goldfish. When I grow up, I want to be: Chef. Ballerina. President.
Let us remember how life felt before the words "timecard" and "rightsizing," before overtime and data entry and inflation and blood pressure medication. Buff out our rougher edges with a sandpaper of shiny sneakers and crisp miniature polos.
Activate the surly, awkward tweens and teens, those sweet, unwilling participants forced to stand on the same front stoops of years past. Glory be to their flat, toothless smiles, their particular jeans, their white plastic earbuds, their precious and mysterious inner lives.
Let us savor this restarting of sacred routines. Let us enjoy the sweetness before feuds with friends, before the whipsaw of emotions and body chemicals. Before the tests get harder, before the team rosters go up and the egos come crashing down. Before the tears flow over the absolute value of the fraction. Before the parents are forced to Google the absolute value of the fraction.
Grant us one more pure millisecond from processing safety laws written under clouds of unthinkable calamity: campus doors locked to keep children safe, random weapons searches and police dogs. No, please. Not yet.
Spare us from the political melees of points of view that draw a line around Absolute Values. Shroud us a little longer from school board races steeped in partisan politics, from the wild things candidates will say and do in the name of children. Serenity, one last moment, from tax battles, cellphone rules, budget shortfalls, parental rights, from the cultural crosshairs of it all.
We will get to it. All of it.
First, bless the week with shoelace bunny ears and backpack keychains. Cafeteria pizza and pudding cups. Crisp new notebooks with the spines uncracked. A bell. A wave. Little feet, medium feet and big feet clomping down the steps of the bus, across the pavement and through open, waiting doors.
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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.
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