The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids

#17 Elves Don’t Wear Hard Hats by Debbie Dadey and Marcia Thornton Jones, 1995.

The playground equipment at Bailey School is old and breaking, so the PTA has decided to fund a new playground for the children. The playground is going to be built by the Bell Construction Company, and when the children meet the owner, Hollis Bell, he is an odd little man with curly-toed work boots. In fact, all of his men are unusually short. However, Mr. Bell promises to build the children the best playground they can imagine.

However, the parents at the school are arguing about the playground, how much it’s going to cost, and whether it really needed to be replaced at all. There’s not a lot of Christmas cheer going around, but Mr. Bell puts up Christmas trees and tells the children that they have their own kind of magic that can help fix their parents’ arguing.

One day, Mr. Bell comes to the third grade class to interview them about what they would like to have on their playground. All of the kids have different ideas, and they end up arguing about the things they’ve heard their parents say about what the playground should be like. However, Mr. Bell urges them to calm down and work together. He tells the children that they should make a list of what they all want and “check it twice.” One of the kids in the class says that it’s impossible to give everyone what they want, but Mr. Bell says that he’s in the business of making wishes come true. Liza asks what happens if someone puts down a really bad idea, and Mr. Bell says that he’ll know if an idea is a bad idea. Because Mr. Bell is short, his tools jingle like jingle bells, and he acts like he can grant their Christmas wishes, the kids start thinking that he might be an elf.

The kids are allowed to watch the workmen work, but Mr. Bell makes it clear that they’re not allowed in the trailer that’s attached to his truck. Naturally, the kids get curious about the trailer. They can’t help but sneak a look inside, and when they do, they find out that it’s a workshop full of toys!

As the children try to figure out if the construction crew might really be elves, they decide to ask the department store Santa more about elves. The kids debate about the department store Santa really being Santa, and the Santa makes a comment about how he’s been meaning to pay a visit to their school, seemingly ignoring a previous book in the series, when Santa apparently became their school’s janitor. However, later in the book, Howie refers to the “new janitor who keeps turning down the heat,” referring to what happened in the previous book, which is confusing. The department store Santa explains that his elves like to fix things, and they are particularly concerned with fixing people who can’t get along, hinting that the arguments over the school’s playground are what brought the elves to the school. Santa’s advice is for the children not to worry because the elves will disappear on their own “when the time is right.”

The deadline for submitting the plan for the new playground is approaching, and the kids realize that if the adults can’t agree on something, they might end up with no playground at all! When the “elves” leave to take care of a job “up north,” and the playground issue still isn’t resolved, the kids think that they probably weren’t magical elves and that they didn’t fix anything, but the kids aren’t ready to give up yet.

When Eddie suggests that they all just build their own playground out of wood and begins drawing his vision of it, it attracts the attention of the adults. At first, the kids think that they’ll have to do all the work on their playground themselves, but the more the adults hear them talk and study the picture Eddie drew, the more involved they become. When the adults were in charge, they each wanted to be considered the leader and authority on the project, with their ideas overshadowing everyone else’s, but with Eddie in charge, the project moves forward. Even though Eddie is a child, he’s the one with the vision to carry the project through, and he neutralizes the adults’ competing egos. The project ends up being finished unexpectedly fast, and in the end, no one knows who actually completed it, hinting that the Mr. Bell might really have been an elf and that he and the other elves secretly returned once everyone came to an agreement about what they really wanted. As always with this series of books, readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.