School Photos

I know a lot of people these days do not buy their children’s school photos anymore. However, schools are going to keep taking them because they are extremely important for the school to have in case anything happens to the children. It really speeds up any situation where identity needs to be released or confirmed quickly.

School photos are also just a rite of passage. It is just interesting to see how kids grow from year to year. It is fun to laugh at goofy photos and just enjoy the results of someone else trying to get a nice picture of your child. Our school pictures were always on the wall growing up. They were updated each year with the newest photos. My kids did not have that experience until they moved in with us. We have ordered every single school photo. We hang them over the fireplace in the living room. I even keep two 13 year photo frames in the hallway that have wallet sizes of all the photos through the years.

You may be wondering how I have all their school photos since they did not move in until fourth and fifth grade, respectively. Well, it took some work and it took some money, but we tracked down all their school photos.

When the adoption went through, I immediately sent out records requests for every lead I could find. I poured through records that would connect me to more agencies to request even more records. The most helpful place to start is their school file. Request their school record as soon as you can. You will find all sorts of information in there. It is really amazing what gets put in those files. We found different legal documents, a will, several interview transcripts, previous caretaker evaluations and all the comments from their previous teachers.

The school record will tell you where and when your child was in school. Our children had been through five districts and seven schools in the years before us. In order to track down the photos, we called the schools and asked who did their school pictures for the years our children attended. Some are really easy because they have been using the same company for decades. Occasionally, the photographer has gone out of business or they do not have a record of who the photographer was in a given year.

Most of our kids’ photos were with two different companies. We called the companies up and they looked through their records and confirmed the existence of the photos. They were in long term storage at one of the companies, so there was a delay in delivery but we were able to easily pay online and get the digital files easily.

There was one photo we were not able to recover this way. It was our oldest’s kindergarten picture. The school did not know who the photographer was and the billing records from that year had already been destroyed. They were able to send us a small digital file of the image that was still in their school database. We did check with the photographers we contacted to see if they had them and they did not. Later we found a physical copy of it in some school papers given to us by one of their past caregivers. Teachers love to stick children’s photos on to the gifts that kids make for their parents. Between those two sources, my partner was able to make a decent digital sized image that we could print a larger size from.

After all that, we had all the photos. I went out and found a couple 13 year photo frames I liked and put together the frames to present to the girls. I also made copies for them to take to their rooms. We were told during our adoption training just how important it is to have pictures of the kids around your home. Every time we hang up new pictures in the house or change out photos in frames, the girls notice. They are immediately drawn to these changes and they stop, stare and really take it all in. When they moved in they would stare for what felt like forever. We eventually learned that they had never had their photos put up in the houses they lived in. Nor did their families ever buy their school photos.

This fall I will be putting the 13th photo in for my oldest. The frame will be complete.