47 pages • 1-hour read
The Best School Year Ever
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Themes
The Importance of Seeing Beyond the Surface
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying, animal cruelty, and child abuse.
When her sixth-grade year begins, Beth is disconcerted to learn that, by the end of the school year, she must think of at least one compliment to give Imogene Herdman. After witnessing the disruptive antics of the Herdman children for years, Beth simply does not believe that there is anything positive to be said about Imogene. By the end of the novel, however, Beth’s understanding shifts, and she comes to understand that in order to understand someone’s true character, it is necessary to look beyond the surface.
Beth uses much of her narrative to establish, in a series of comic vignettes, how terrible the Herdman children are. She depicts Imogene going along with her siblings’ schemes to steal Howard, wash their cat at the laundromat, and steal the talent show treats. She shares a story specifically about Imogene in Chapter 5, in which Imogene convinces all of the other children that the teacher’s lounge is a dangerous place where children are being held captive. Beth shares these stories as evidence for her claims that the Herdmans are awful people and that Imogene is without redeeming qualities. Because this is her view of Imogene, she does not believe she can ever come up with an honest compliment for the girl: She believes it will be “probably the hardest thing [she will] have to do all year” (52). This emphatic declaration foreshadows the epiphany that arrives near the novel’s conclusion, as Beth sees another side of Imogene and begins to live up to the complement she receives from Joanne: “fair to everybody” (111).
What Beth is missing during most of the story is that while Imogene may at times be dishonest and callous, she is also imaginative, determined, curious, and clever. Beth’s concern for propriety and morality initially prevents her from seeing Imogene clearly: When Imogene tells her creative tale about the teacher’s lounge, Beth tries to consider this as evidence of Imogene having a good imagination—but she quickly rejects the idea, because “it [is] just a big lie” (52). When Imogene substitutes her own baby blanket for Howard’s missing one in Chapter 7, however, Beth experiences a turning point in her understanding. For the first time, she considers that Imogene might have good qualities in addition to bad. She thinks of her first sincere compliment for Imogene: Imogene is “sympathetic” (87).
In the novel’s final chapter, Alice’s continued harassment of Imogene and her vocal opposition to the idea that there might be anything good about this difficult girl causes Beth to realize how dramatically her own opinion has shifted. She sees that Imogene is smart, “enterprising” (114), “powerful” (115), and compassionate. In fact, Imogene has the same potential for a bright future as any other child at the Woodrow Wilson School: She “[can] be almost anything she [wants] to be in life: (115).
The Need for Communal Support Systems for Families
Beth’s narration is very critical of the Herdman children themselves, and the entire community seems to share her disdain. The six Herdman children—Imogene, Ralph, Leroy, Gladys, Claude, and Ollie—live in a converted garage. Their yard is full of “rocks and poison ivy and torn up bicycles and pieces of cars” (31), and even their court-appointed social worker, Miss Philips, avoids their house. While many in town are quick to blame either the children or their mother for this situation, the book points to a larger problem: a societal failure to provide support for struggling families. The Herdman children’s single mother works double shifts at a shoe factory—something she must do in order to pay for her children’s basic needs. Her six young children are often left unsupervised, creating havoc in town and turning everyone against them, but it’s not clear what their mother could do differently. Instead, the blame belongs with a society that offers little meaningful support for parents of young children.
The children use their unsupervised time for pranks, petty theft, and minor destruction—and as a result, they are banned from most of the town’s businesses and excluded from what few public services the community offers, including all municipal buildings and the school’s bus system. They are portrayed as constantly dirty and hungry, and much of their mischief centers on securing food for themselves. They are frequently absent from school, and the school authorities do not inquire about these absences—instead, they treat the children’s absences as a welcome break. The Herdmans do have an assigned social worker, Miss Philips, who gossips about them to Mrs. Bradley and confides that she “just [drives] by the place once a month” and “figure[s] they’re all right” as long as “they haven’t managed to blow it up or burn it down” (32). This attitude of amused resignation suggests that even Miss Philips, a representative of official care, feels helpless in the face of insufficient resources.
Many of the other students’ lives stand in contrast to those of the Herdmans, showing what parents can do to support their children when they have the resources to do so. The community’s parents show up for the school talent show, despite its lackluster roster of talent, and get very invested in the show’s outcome. They show up at the school to demand answers after the snake incident and insist that the newspaper revise its story about fire safety when it does not focus sufficient attention on their own children. Alice’s mother is the ultimate exemplar of this kind of parenting: She is a member of the PTA, is often at the school, and puts her daughter forward for any opportunity she can find. She brags about Alice often and is clearly her daughter’s greatest champion. Although Beth’s parents are not as pushy and partisan as Mrs. Wendleken, they are also highly involved in their children’s lives. Beth and Charlie are often depicted talking about their days and sharing their ideas and feelings with their parents. Mrs. Bradley is a member of the PTA, and she has strong opinions about everything that happens at Woodrow Wilson Elementary.
While the home lives of the other children in the novel are often portrayed as more supportive and structured, the Herdman family is not the only one that struggles with a lack of support. When Mrs. McCluskey gets a job with the phone company, her daughter Louella—one of Beth’s classmates—must bring her toddler brother to school on a leash. While played for comic effect, Louella’s predicament highlights the same lack of accessible childcare and other public support that so negatively impacts the Herdmans. For this reason, this is the incident that brings out another side of Imogene and teaches Beth her central lesson about looking beyond the surface of character. Imogene takes young Howard into her care, protecting him from the other children and giving him her own baby blanket after he loses his, because she understands what it means to have no adults to turn to.
The Danger of Valuing Order Above Compassion
Although The Best School Year Ever is ostensibly the story of Beth’s struggle to find something complimentary to say about Imogene, most of the novel’s action is actually focused on the antisocial behavior of the Herdman children and the consequences this behavior has for their community. The Herdmans refuse to follow the rules of a society that has already written them off, and their refusal creates chaos and destruction that has a decidedly negative impact on everyone around them, especially themselves. This vicious cycle of alienation—in which the community ostracizes the Herdman children, and the children respond through increasingly antisocial behavior, thus reinforcing their ostracization—illustrates the negative consequences that arise when a community values the appearance of order and stability above the needs of actual people.
The Herdman children’s behavior has many practical impacts on the community, and they are portrayed throughout the novel as agents of chaos. They cause local businesses to lose money—for example, when the gas station owner loses customers when Claude is stuck in the bathroom, or when the laundromat owner has to pay for the damages the children have caused at the laundromat. The town’s fire department responds to more than one false alarm caused by the Herdman children’s antics, and they delay the school’s annual fire drill every year—the fire chief has grown so tired of them that, when they are absent from school all at once, he sighs with disappointment when he learns that they are merely absent: “I thought maybe they moved away,” he comments, “Oh, well” (90). The Herdmans steal the refreshments from the talent show, and they are known for taking students’ lunches and pocket money—either by force or trickery.
The Herdman children’s bad behavior also has a psychological impact on the people around them. The town clerk is traumatized at the thought of having swallowed tiny frogs, Louella is panicked when the Herdmans temporarily kidnap baby Howard, students and teachers are frightened by Leroy’s dead snake, and most of the students at school live in fear of being hit, bitten by Gladys, or stuffed in the trash masher by Leroy. Beth notes that “there wasn’t a kid in the Woodrow Wilson school who didn’t wriggle or twitch or tie knots in his hair or something […] Some kids banged their heads, too” (41). A certain amount of fidgeting is typical of children this age, but the Woodrow Wilson children are portrayed as much more anxious and distracted than is usual.
Because the Herdman children create both practical and psychological problems for the community, the community responds to them with suspicion, scorn, and callousness, thus exacerbating the very problem they hope to solve. Beth notes that they are excluded from participation in many things—they cannot go inside most buildings in town and are banned from the school’s bus system—people openly mock them—as when Alice makes mean comments about Imogene’s cleanliness or the siblings’ being banned from the school bus—and they are automatically blamed for anything that goes wrong at school or in the community. Their own teachers and social worker do very little to reach out to and help the Herdman children, even ignoring their frequent absences from school. Predictably, the children respond to their public shunning with further antisocial behavior. When they are banned from the bus, for example, they cleverly undermine the other students’ confidence in the bus until no one wants to ride it. The community’s efforts to exclude these difficult children only make the problem worse. Meanwhile, the true narrative antagonists are not the Herdman children but Alice and her mother—avatars of the town’s excessive love of order. Unlike narrator and protagonist Beth, Alice never gets over her inability to imagine anything positive about Imogene, and when Beth delivers her sincere compliments, Alice cruelly and publicly calls her a liar. In her unrepentant callousness, Alice embodies the town’s unwillingness to look beyond its reasonable desire for stability and see the genuine needs of its residents.
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