Recap: I was getting incessant messages that all the kids in town were skipping school. Finally my active kids--a rather large family of them--were also affected. Following the advice I picked up here, I looked and saw that the students were in fact standing around in front of the schoolhouse doors all day.

I decided to try to fix this. The first thing I did was to replace the "Community School for the Gifted" rabbithole with two of the little rabbitholes from Aurora Skies on the same lot, which I didn't expect to work and it didn't. Then I removed one of those and set up a different school rabbithole on a different lot. My plan was to send the teens to the "Gooder" school which looks more like a high school and to send the children to the other one.

Welp, first I could find no lot options for the schools. Namaradus & I think J4KS explained that they'd show up after I exited and returned. So now I've done that, and lot options showed up...kinda, for a while.

In Story Progression/Lot Optoions/ Caste Disallow, "children" does not show up, so I could not make the high school disallow children. But I was able to make the elementary school disallow teens.

But it solved nothing. First of all, the school bus never showed up till after 10 o'clock and my attempts to make the kids go to school independently (they have bikes) failed. They all got noted for skipping school even though I had tried to send them. Then the bus drove around randomly for several hours and not all of them got on the bus anyway. Then I saw that the high school did have only teens on it, but most of them weren't going in the doors. I reset the lot and they started going in but it was really late by then. I have no idea where the inactive sim elementary children were--my actives were being taken on a slow cruise in the school bus.

At this point I quit without saving.

And when I reopened my game just now I was enraged to discover that in fact the game saved during all this mess, and I can't back up to the beginning of the day (I have prior saves, of course, and I may just revert to one of them, but I think it'll make me lose something I don't want to, grrr)

And now the elementary school no longer has story progression available at all.

I'm at the point of emigrating this family to yet a new neighborhood with fewer inactive sims, now.

Actually I think I let Saver save the game when I was not paying attention so there's probably something for me to revert to. Trying that now.

There is no built in caste called "Children." You either need to create a new automatic caste for them or change the high school to Teens only. Only issue with the second method is that will disallow YAs and older from working in that particular school.

The SP Lot caste restrictions only work if you have GoHere installed. Do you have that one?

Not sure about the school bus being late, getting lost and wandering around (stuck field trip scenario maybe?) but I would think a MC Reset Everything from City Hall might be in order at some point here.

Yes, I have GoHere installed. And now I get to learn how to make an automatic caste! (previous save is loading). I think I may try to send them to school by bike before the bus is supposed to come and see if that helps. Though stuck field trip might explain things too, since the teens were supposed to go on a field trip that day.

For more detail on school assignments see I would like to have different sims attend separate schools in my town.<a href="http://nraas.wikispaces.com/StoryProgre ... chools">SP Schools FAQ</a>

It's really not difficult. On City Hall or an in-game computer,
NRaas > SP > Caste Options > New Caste > (call it Children or whatever you like)
NRaas > SP > Caste Options > Children > Caste:Automatic > True
NRaas > SP > Caste Options > Children > Caste:Age > Children

Field Trips are evil. But it sounds like the flag on the one from the prior day was never reset.

Also, do you have children and teens within the same household now destined to go to different schools? That's fine, but school buses don't work very well (in my experience) when this happens and I usually cancel the service. Or at least do so for all but one school.

Oh sorry, not the prior day it's a different school. Yeah, they got on the "wrong" bus there.

Brappl, I've been trhying to follow that FAQ, but I keep having no options on the lots where the schools are. I got lot options once, in a different save, but I don't know whether that worked, because everything else went wrong.

So now I'm trying to cancel the school bus but failing...I went to retuner/settings/general/by tunable xml/vehicles/CarBusSchool and the thing that came up didn't allow for any changes?

Oh I wish I could edit instead of starting a new comment. Maybe the field trip scenario is why I have no lot options? I'm going to try to suffer through this day one more time only getting the kids to school, any school, on time, and then see if I can set things up for the next day.

& I crashed the game by minimizing while saving. I keep forgetting that's not safe. Oh well, I'll do it again tomorrow or something.