The Best School Year Ever

In The Best School Year Ever, the largely unsupervised Herdman children create chaos throughout their rural community, and the community responds by shaming and ostracizing the children, creating a vicious cycle in which the children’s behavior only becomes more unmanageable as they attempt to address their unmet physical and emotional needs. According to the CDC’s factsheet, the Herdman children’s situation meets the standard for child neglect, which is defined as “the failure to meet a child’s basic physical and emotional needs. These needs include housing, food, clothing, education, access to medical care, and having feelings validated and appropriately responded to” (“Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024). The Herdman children live in squalor. They are hungry and dirty, frequently miss school, and have almost no adults available to meet their emotional needs. Children suffering from neglect like this are at risk for injury and illness, generally have poorer educational outcomes, and can develop behavioral and psychological problems that last a lifetime. They are often ostracized at school and within their communities. The Herdman children experience many of these issues: they are shunned by their peers and within their small town. They struggle to attend their classes and create chaos with their unregulated behavior.

The novel makes clear, however, that this situation is not the fault of the Herdman children’s single mother. Rather, the blame belongs with the entire community and with the wider society of which it forms a part. The children’s mother must work two shifts at a local shoe factory to support them: The economic demands of supporting her children leave her with no time to devote to parenting them. In a community with no apparent resources for parents beyond the local public school, she has no choice but to leave them unsupervised for much of the day. The novel’s other adult characters, including teachers and school administrators, do nothing to help the children, choosing to criticize them and gossip about them and their mother instead. The novel, first published in 1994, takes place in a small American town modeled on the Ohio town in which author Robinson grew up. Like many rural communities in the second half of the 20th century, this one appears to lack any meaningful safety net for families like the Herdmans. Even today, across the US, lack of accessible childcare has a profound impact on children and parents. In a 2020 study by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, “58% of working parents reported leaving work because they were unable to find childcare solutions that met their needs” (Melhorn, Stephanie Ferguson. “Understanding America’s Labor Shortage: The Impact of Scarce and Costly Childcare.” US Chamber of Commerce, 2024). For parents like the Herdman children’s mother, who is her family’s sole economic provider as well as its sole caregiver, this situation can lead to impossible choices.