School life / Letters collected in 2018 and school rescues in 2019
The tooth fairy would like a reference
A tooth goes missing at school, and somebody must vouch.
Lily Sciulli was a seven-year-old first grader at Burchfield Elementary in Pennsylvania when she lost a tooth in June 2019. The school nurse put it in a novelty necklace, which was accidentally tossed in the lunch trash.
That is a tooth lost twice, and Lily, her teacher Laura Roth later told Good Morning America, was sobbing. Any seven-year-old can tell you which loss destroyed the evidence.
Roth reassured Lily that she and the fairy went back twenty-five years, and wrote the fairy a letter vouching for the tooth. Some mornings you need the teacher to know fractions. This one called for excellent contacts in a tiny, secretive industry.
Lily hung the note on her bed and woke the next day, her birthday, to two dollars and a reply.
Across the Atlantic, London's Wellcome Collection published tooth fairy letters in 2018 that families had shared during its Teeth exhibition, noting that children's most urgent question is whether the fairy will still leave a coin when the tooth has gone missing.
One caption asks whether Libby, aged nine, should get double the usual amount for losing a molar on her birthday. I find the case persuasive, and I also know what it costs. Double is a precedent. Give it a few years and someone will want to know whether Tuesdays count.
In October 2019, a Wisconsin television station reported on Curt Angeli, principal of Gillett Elementary, who had written to the fairy on behalf of a student whose tooth had apparently gone missing during recess. Angeli, calling himself a "trained principal and hobby dentist," said the student had a gap that was not there that morning and asked for the usual rate. At the end, he made a request of his own: compensation for the wisdom teeth he lost in 1987.
This strikes me as exactly right. If you have spent a workday preparing a child's claim, you are entitled to glance at your own account. Whether a claim from 1987 survives the fairy's audit is not for me to say.
Anyone who has stood at a dark bedroom door holding a dollar and a half-formed plan can take comfort that a principal, at least once, put these things in writing.