By Jennifer Buergermeister
For seventy-five years, our yearbook program has been a cornerstone of student storytelling, a beautiful, thriving publication built on pride, legacy, and the relentless work ethic of the students who create it. Every year, we kick off the production season with our first major deadline and Club Photo Day, a whirlwind of hundreds of group portraits stitched into a living archive of our school community. It’s a marathon of coordination and creativity, and the students always rise to the occasion.
And each year, we celebrate those two monumental days the same way: with pizza.
A simple tradition. A joyful one. A recognition of their effort.
This year, all they wanted was Domino’s.
What I didn’t expect was that ordering pizza, a task that should take five minutes, would plunge me into a five-and-a-half-hour odyssey that left me questioning far more than a food order.
The Call That Never Connected
Because our district has new layers of approvals and shifting responsibilities, I wanted to make sure the tax-exempt form was already on file so finance could place the order in the morning without delays. Easy, right?
So at 4 p.m., I called Domino’s.
I stayed on hold for thirty minutes.
Then someone picked up, and hung up.
I called again.
On hold. Hung up again.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Hours passed.
By 9:30 p.m., I had never once reached a human being.
Not to ask a question.
Not to place a large order.
Not even to confirm they’d accept a tax-exempt purchase.
Twenty pizzas across two days – great business for them. Yet somehow, impossibly, I couldn’t even break through the static long enough to tell them so.
I sat there at on my couch wondering, Is this really what it’s come to? I can’t even order a pizza? What realm do I live in?
The Trickle-Down Effect of Disconnection
It might sound dramatic, but that moment cracked something open in me.
Because this wasn’t just about pizza.
This was about systems breaking down.
About stress trickling from the top of our institutions all the way down to the smallest, simplest interactions.
About civility being chipped away – one automated system, one disconnected employee, one unreturned call at a time.
I work in a school system that has been reshaped again and again by shifting leadership, state oversight, personnel turnover, and ever-changing rules. Everyone is trying to navigate new pathways. Everyone is dealing with someone else’s new pressures. It all accumulates.
And today, that accumulation made it impossible for a teacher to order pizza for her hardworking kids.
It’s a tiny thing on the surface.
But tiny things reveal bigger truths.
What Scares Me Most
What scares me isn’t the inconvenience.
It isn’t even the five hours of wasted time.
It’s that the students might not get their pizza tomorrow, not because we didn’t try, not because I forgot, not because they haven’t earned it, but because the world around them is fraying in ways that make even the simplest acts harder.
That scares me for the United States of America.
Because when a society becomes so strained that we can’t perform basic acts of human connection, like answering a phone, helping a customer, or supporting a teacher trying to support her students, we should pay attention.
These small fractures are symptoms of bigger ones.
My students work hard.
They meet deadlines.
They take responsibility.
They uphold a legacy seventy-five years in the making.
They deserve to be celebrated with something as simple as a few slices of pizza.
I’ll keep fighting for them – through the red tape, the shifting policies, the dropped calls, and the hold music that seems to stretch into eternity. Because they are worth it.
But tonight, I am sitting with the weight of something larger.
This wasn’t a story about pizza.
This was a story about America—about leadership, burnout, fraying systems, and the slow erosion of the everyday civility we used to take for granted.
And all I can think as I look at tomorrow’s club photo day is:
I hope the kids get their pizza.
They’ve more than earned it.