Joy School

Picture this Allen, Texas. Mid-1980s.Before Allen had a Target, before half the town existed, there was Joy School.

I was three when it started. Setting: Hillside Village, Allen, Texas. It lasted two years. There were six kids in the class. We met twice a week. There were “Joy” lessons, crafts, a graduation, and some kind of schedule to

Graduation June 6, 1987

decide whose house was when.

Joy School was basically a tiny neighborhood preschool operation run out of people’s living rooms, where children were handed craft supplies and mild social expectations, and the adults around us acted like they were guiding us through something deeply meaningful and possibly preparing us for future leadership.

And honestly, in their defense, maybe they were.

But also: we were four.

So while the curriculum may have had lofty goals, most of us were probably one inconvenience away from lying face-down on the floor.

Still, by the end of it, we had a graduation.

Not just a nice little “good job, everybody.” Not just a snack and a wave. No. A full emotional production. Caps. Names being called. Parents with cameras. The whole thing.

And that is what makes it so funny to me now.

Because we lined up and waited to be presented like miniature scholars, when in reality we had most likely spent the year gluing macaroni to construction paper, singing songs, and being reminded not to touch other people’s snacks.

I remember standing there in line, which is really excellent preparation for adulthood, when you think about it. Childhood is mostly waiting in line, and then adulthood arrives and says, good news, that part stays.

You wait your turn. You adjust the tiny cap on your head that fits nobody correctly. You try not to scratch your face with hands that still have traces of paste, frosting, or cheese cracker dust on them.

Then your name is called.

You walk forward.

The adults beam.

For what reason, I cannot say.

You are handed a paper diploma with the structural integrity of a damp napkin. This was not an heirloom document. This was not something destined to be framed and handed down through generations. This was a rolled-up piece of paper already halfway to becoming trash the second it entered the hands of a four-year-old.

A four-year-old is not a careful archivist.

A four-year-old is a person who, ten minutes earlier, may have licked a handprint off the table.

And still, there were parents smiling like their child had just finished medical school.

I say that with love, because that’s what makes it sweet too. The grown-ups were so proud. Proud that they had gotten us dressed, gotten us there, probably bribed us into decent behavior, and seen us through a year of songs, snacks, crafts, and lessons that were trying very hard to land in a room full of children whose main long-term goal was seeing if the cookies that day were the good kind.

No amount of adult planning could override the fact that the attendees were all still just very small people. Somebody at graduation was probably on the verge of tears. Somebody else had wandered mentally off a cliff halfway through the program. One child was picking at the cap. One was sitting beautifully, but only because they had entered the kind of blank emotional shutdown usually seen in people serving jury duty. Another was absolutely ready to ruin the group photo over a minor perceived insult.

That is what makes childhood ceremonies so incredible. Adults bring order, hope, and a camera. Children bring unresolved feelings about snack distribution.

And still the parents smiled.

Honestly, that may be the most endearing part of the whole thing. The diploma was worthless. The cap was temporary. The child receiving these honors might not even make it to the car without needing a meltdown, a nap, or both. But for one shining moment, the adults got to see their little person dressed up and trying. Maybe not succeeding in any measurable academic sense, but showing up. Standing there. Participating. Existing in public without setting anything on fire.

That, apparently, was enough.

And maybe that’s why these things stay in your memory more than they should. Not because Joy School was some huge scholarly triumph. Not because the diploma meant anything. But because adults have always had this touching tendency to treat ordinary childhood survival as a major achievement.

Which, honestly, it kind of is.

Especially when you are four, wearing a paper cap, holding a fake diploma, and trying to get through a graduation ceremony without eating it.

At four, your greatest credential is being willing to stand where you’re told for nine consecutive seconds.

The whole thing had this feeling of: if we can make it through finger paint and group singing, the future is basically ours.

The curriculum was part alphabet, part patriotism, part gentle chaos, and by the end of the year we were emotionally prepared for kindergarten, deeply suspicious of felt boards forever, and fully trained in the art of sitting in a circle while pretending to listen.

Joy School in 1980's Allen was preschool run entirely out of someone’s living room by moms armed with a laminator, a cassette player, and the confidence to host a pack of four-year-old's before noon.

Every activity involved construction paper, blunt scissors, and glue that never fully washed off your hands. We learned colors, shapes, and how to sit crisscross applesauce for about twelve seconds before wandering off.

Joy School also quietly prepared us for a very specific kind of confusion: being dropped off at a different mom’s house every week and wandering up to random women with your eyes basically asking, Are you my mother?

With Joy School rotating houses, we spent a solid year approaching unfamiliar women the way the baby bird in Are You My Mother? approached a steam shovel: politely, hopefully, and deeply unsure.

If you ask my mom how many kids were in my class, the official historical record is somewhere between six and ten children. Her exact answer was “6 to 8 to 10.”

Which feels right.

Joy School was not a place known for precise census data.

What we do know is that a group of us sat in a circle on someone’s carpet while one mom tried to lead the lesson and the rest of us attempted to remain seated long enough to get to snack time.

Joy School by the Numbers

Allen, circa 1987

• 8 kids sitting in a circle

• 1 mom trying to teach

• 12 glue sticks

• 14 interruptions

• 2 kids who actually listened (me being one)

• 1 kid eating paste

• 1 clean-up song stuck in your head for 40 years

Joy School actually had a curriculum. It was organized around something called the “Joys.”

Things like:

• The Joy of Family

• The Joy of Sharing

• The Joy of Your Body

• The Joy of the Earth

• The Joy of Goals

• The Joy of Uniqueness

The idea was to help small children develop character, kindness, and good habits.

In practice, the curriculum mostly involved sitting in a circle, singing songs, making crafts, and trying not to eat the glue.

The classroom was always someone’s house. Usually that meant kids sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, construction paper all over the coffee table, crayons already broken in half, and a mom at the front holding some kind of poster board or puppet or felt board like she was about to change our lives.

The crafts were ambitious in theory and chaotic in practice.

There was glue. There was construction paper. There were markers that were supposed to stay on the paper but did not always cooperate.

At the end of the lesson, every child went home holding something that vaguely resembled the craft the teacher had demonstrated.

Parents were expected to admire these masterpieces.

And they did.

One of the clearest Joy School art memories I still have is making those black-paper silhouette portraits of ourselves. There was something both funny and weirdly serious about seeing your preschool profile turned into a tiny formal portrait, like you had already lived a long and dramatic life by age four.

And then there was Gunny Bag.

Joy School introduced the character “Gunny Bag,” also known as Gunny Man, which was basically a cloth bag that ate up scattered toys and didn’t give them back until Saturday. If Gunny Bag ate a toy twice, it was gone forever.

That is a surprisingly intense policy for preschool.

But it clearly worked, because the children really did scramble to pick up toys when Gunny Bag showed its face.

And because this was the 1980s and all effective preschool warnings had to be turned into music, Gunny Bag came with a song.

“Gunny Bag”

Written by Wendy and Bill Murdock

Look at this mess.

Somebody might shout

Enough stuff’s everywhere

You better watch out

’Cause here comes gunny man

Yum Yum Yummy

He eats the leftover toys

And keeps them in his tummy

So keep your things

Nice and neat

So Gunny can’t find

A thing to eat

’Cause here comes gunny man

Yum Yum Yummy

He eats the leftover toys

And keeps them in his tummy

Honestly, a lot of early childhood education was just adults taking a mild threat and putting it to a catchy tune.

And apparently that works, because I still remember it.

So that was Joy School in late-1980s Allen, Texas. Before Target. Before half the neighborhoods existed. Before Allen was the Allen people think of now.

It was preschool, but in someone’s living room. It was neighborhood moms rotating houses and trying to manage a small herd of four-year-old's. It was Joy lessons, snacks, glue, silhouette portraits, felt boards, graduation caps, and a cleanup song that has now been lodged in my brain for what appears to be forever.

It was part alphabet, part patriotism, part crafts, part chaos, and part adults doing their absolute best to make something meaningful and memorable for a bunch of very small people who were mostly just there for the snack.

And somehow, it worked.

That may be the part I like most now. It was homemade. It was small. It was probably chaotic almost all the time. But it also had structure, intention, songs, crafts, and moms who cared enough to make it happen.

So yes, Joy School was part preschool, part neighborhood experiment, part craft explosion, and part ceremonial overachievement.

And somehow it gave us black paper silhouettes, suspicious feelings about felt boards, a fake diploma, and Gunny Bag, who remains one of the more effective enforcers of domestic order I’ve ever seen.

Not bad for a preschool run out of somebody’s living room in Allen, Texas.

Before Target .Before half the town existed. Back when getting a room full of four-year-old's dressed, seated, and through a graduation without open revolt was already a major accomplishment.

And honestly, that still feels diploma-worthy.