Guess What's Missing!

I teach at an early start school and the Kindergartners go to lunch at 10:30 am.

Lunches arrived shortly before one, ready for their fifteen minutes in the oven.

Even if we had petty cash on hand that could cover, say, an all school deli run, we kept hearing that lunches would be on site by 10:45.  Well, 11:00.  In maybe half an hour.  They aren't there yet?  Certainly before noon.  And so on.  Once it gets past 11:00, it's really too late to do anything but wait.

The kids who expected to eat school lunch got cold cereal with milk and a sampling of granola bars from my extra snack stash.  I also gave them an all-fruit popsicle towards the end of the day.  It was a rotten situation and the kids were great about it, I have to say.

I can't get over this!  I mean, mistakes do happen.  Lunch has been late before.  But this kind of thing - on the first day of school! - is inexcusable.  What kind of message does this send to parents?  I should NEVER be in a position where I have to explain that your child may be famished because SFUSD left us unable to feed your child.

Otherwise, it was an easy first day.  (I'd rather they eat lunch a little later - the two and a half hours after lunch get pretty long for Kindergartners - so in some ways a late lunch wouldn't have been bad.)  This was the first time I never felt that I had no idea what I would do next on the first day of school.  Almost all of the kids on my roster showed up but one of the Ks is very small.  No one got lost and there were only a couple of criers, both of whom settled quickly.  This class is overall very confident, so the usual management issues (frightened of school, too shy to ask for the bathroom) will probably apply less.

I know that most teachers start pretty strict and get looser; I tend to go the other way.  I just don't think they can manage every routine and protocol I'm planning to hold them to on the first day of school.  Tomorrow I think I'll be enforcing sit-on-one-picture on the rug (they love each other and want to be close) and walking in a line (I don't deal with cutting, but today we had some clumping problems).   They should also get imagination stations tomorrow, which they will enjoy.

They also seemed to largely enjoy themselves; this was the first year where a lot of kids apropos of nothing informed me that they like Kindergarten and our class and all that stuff - near the end of the day.  Usually by the end of the day the kids who wanted to tell me they like our class did so earlier and are tired and the kids who aren't sure yet are cranky.  Hopefully they will still like me and the class tomorrow afternoon, too.