Fifth grader Jack finds himself the target of ridicule at school when it becomes known that his father is one of the janitors, and he turns his anger onto his father.

When his older brother gets in serious trouble, sixth-grader Clay decides to change his own mischief-making ways, but he cannot seem to shake his reputation as a troublemaker.

Slippers is sad that Laura and Edward have no time for him on the first day of school, but he finds a comfortable backpack in which to fall asleep before they leave.

"Miss Bruce is the new student teacher in Jake's second-grade class, and she never smiles. Never. But when Jake cracks up during class during a spelling bee, he sees the tiniest hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. Suddenly, Jake has a new mission in life; to be so funny that even Miss Bruce will laugh!"

As the new Keepers of the School, sixth-graders Ben and Jill must decipher a handful of clues written as maritime riddles to save their school from demolition by a greedy company.

An incident at school forces sixth grader Phil Morelli, a white boy, to become aware of racial discrimination and segregation, and to seriously consider if he himself is prejudiced.

Ted Hammond, the only sixth grader in his small Nebraska town's one-room schoolhouse, searches for clues to the disappearance of a homeless family. Ted Hammond loves a good mystery, and in the spring of his fifth-grade year, he's working on a big one. How can his school in the little town of Plattsford stay open next year if there are going to be only five students? Out here on the Great Plains in western Nebraska, everyone understands that if you...

Twelve-year-old identical twins Jay and Ray have long resented that everyone treats them as one person, and so they hatch a plot to take advantage of a clerical error at their new school and pretend they are just one.

As Benjamin Pratt and his friends Jill and Robert continue their efforts to save their school, they find themselves dodging two evil janitors, Lyman and Wally, but their team has also grown and now has a secret fund of millions of dollars.