School Daze

Report to the Principal’s Office by Jerry Spinelli, 1991.

This is the first book in a series about a group of unlikely friends in middle school.

The start of the new school year is a disaster for Sunny Wyler. Her best friend, Hillary, lives directly across the street from her house, and they’ve been close for their entire lives, always attending the same school. However, because of the construction of a new middle school in their town and changing school zone lines, which happen to be drawn directly down the middle of their street, Sunny and Hillary will now be sent to different schools for middle school. (During my childhood, parents could sometimes ask for a boundary exception for kids from the local school district so they could attend a different school with their friends, but that doesn’t appear to be an option here.) Hillary tries to be optimistic, pointing out that the new middle school that Sunny will be attending is much nicer than the old middle school that she will have to attend, but Sunny doesn’t care about that. She just wants to go to school with her best friend.

Sunny thinks that she’s come up with a plan to reunite with Hillary. She’s decided to make herself so obnoxious at her new school that they will kick her out, and her parents will have no choice but to send her to Hillary’s school. She’s decided to wear an old t-shirt that says “Death to Mushrooms” every day, never washing it, so she’ll smell bad. She’ll refuse to wash her hair, so it will be dirty and greasy. Above all, she’ll have the worst attitude, never smile, and never talk, never even answering if her teacher asks her questions in class.

Eddie Mott first encounters Sunny Wyler on the bus to school. She sits next to him, and he can tell right away that she has problems and a bad attitude, and that’s the last thing he wants for the beginning of his new school year. Eddie is trying to adopt a more grown-up image in his middle school years, and he desperately wants to fit in with the other kids. He’s trying to wear the right clothes, be friendly with other kids, and above all, avoid problems. None of that has prepared him for Sunny.

There is one person, though, who has done his best to prepare for all the kids who will be coming to the new middle school, the school’s principal, Mr. Brimlow. Over the summer, he studied the details of the incoming students, and he can recognize them on sight as soon as they arrive. When the school bus driver tells him that there’s a kid on the bus who refuses to get off, he recognizes the kid immediately as Eddie. Between dealing with Sunny’s aggressive unfriendliness and being roughed up by older kids on the bus, Eddie can’t bring himself to come to the school. The bus driver, impatient to get to his other job, actually drives off with the principal, Eddie, and Salem, a girl with literary ambitions who wanted to study the situation for story fodder, still on board.

Things are generally going wrong all over Plumstead Middle School as everyone, including the teachers, try to figure out their way around, but Mr. Brimlow is calm and good-natured, and getting back to school with Eddie and Salem after their bus adventure breaks the ice between them. When Mr. Brimlow gets back to his office, he finds Dennis “Pickles” Johnson waiting for him. Dennis, who gained his nickname from the time he decorated his family’s Christmas tree with actual pickles and the incident made the local paper, is an amateur inventor who made his own oversized skateboard that looks like a pickle. The reason why he was sent to the principal’s office is that his skateboard won’t fit in his locker, and he can’t have it in class. When Pickles asks the principal what could happen if he were allowed to ride his skateboard around the school, the principal asks to try the skateboard himself. He’s unable to stop himself and ends up rolling into a nearby classroom and crashing into the geography teacher’s desk, proving to Pickles (and everybody else) what could happen if Pickles is allowed to use his skateboard in the school hallways. Mr. Brimlow forbids Pickles to bring the skateboard to school again but also thanks him for the fun ride and invites him to lunch.

Far from being upset by the strange beginning to the school year, Mr. Brimlow is actually grateful for the eccentric students and their shenanigans because he really likes to get to know his students, and he particularly learns a lot about Eddie, Salem, Pickles, and Sunny on their first day. It hasn’t escaped his notice that Sunny is being purposely sour to other people, and it isn’t really a surprise when one of her teachers sends her to the principal’s office after she deliberately answers all of her math problems wrong, misspells everything in a writing assignment, writes all of her assignments in extra tiny writing to make them difficult to read, and then pretends to flick boogers at Eddie.

When she’s sent to the principal’s office, Sunny thinks that her plan of being obnoxious has already worked and that she’ll soon be sent home or to Hillary’s school, but the principal ends up inviting her to lunch along with Pickles, Eddie, and Salem. The principal actually enjoys the experience, and rather than punishing any of the students for their various shenanigans from the morning, he decides to give each of them special jobs to help them settle into life at their new school. Since Eddie was a flag raiser at his old school, Mr. Brimlow gives him that job at Plumstead Middle School, assigning Pickles to help him. He puts Sunny in charge of taking care of an escaped hamster that the kids found, and noting Salem’s interest in people’s personalities and organizational skills, puts Salem in charge of all of the other students as they are given the collective job of coming up with a mascot for the school.

Through these activities, the four kids become friends with each other and also start to become a real part of their new school. Instead of being kicked out, Sunny is the one who comes up with the winning idea for the school’s new mascot, the Hamsters, becoming attached to the hamster that she has to care for and upset during a time when she thinks that he’s dead. (Fortunately, the hamster is fine in the end.) Eddie thinks of himself as a wimp for being pushed around by the older kids, but Pickles becomes his friend and sticks up for him, and Salem writes a story about him to show him why he’s actually a hero in his own small way.

It’s a good story about a group of unlikely friends with likable, eccentric characters. In the end, the principal’s tactic of helping the students to adjust to middle school by getting them more involved works well, and even Sunny realizes that she can be happy in her new school with her new friends while still being friends with Hillary from across the street.

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