I have two issues

You could have too many children, as TadOlson mentioned, so some are randomly excluded. However, you don't NEED a mod to fix the issue. If you have too many school-aged kids, you can simply place another school on an empty lot. Then enroll your kids in that school. Having NRaas mods will help as you can assign other kids in the neighborhood to the school you wish them to attend. Eventually, kids would start attending the closest school; but those already enrolled in the old school would continue there without redirection.

I love creating a caste system for the schools so that one is an elementary school and the other is a high school. This means that they can meet all the others their same age.

With the babies, Sims usually pick them up when they cry that they need attention for a bottle or diaper change, right? (I usually immediately buy a birthday cake for babies after the initial round of interactions.)

We've had a few threads on the baby/toddler care thing recently. Yes, the actives sometimes need to be directed by the player to take care of the babies. If they are fixating on toddlers who don't really need that much care, or are supposed to be asleep at the time, I would suggest locking the bedroom doors to keep them out temporarily, as long as someone who does need to get in has access. Sims on high free will do not always put the best priority on things they want/try to do, on low free will it can actually seem worse at times as very important things (taking care of the baby) might not ever get into their action queues on their own.

How many children and teens are trying to get into this school at 9am? Most of us find that, without mods to help, a single school will max out at somewhere just above 20 or maybe 25 students and there will be traffic jams trying to get in with some of them never quite making it inside. One solution is to provide a second school with various ways to decide how enrollment should be done. Very popular is by age so an elementary and a high school using NRaas SP Lot Options and GoHere to arrange this. Another is to use a mod that increases school door usage so that more sims can get in and out freely without the traffic jams as by default only one school door is used.
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=568897

Most players do not need a Core Mod (AwesomeMod) merely to address school overcrowding and none of this has anything to do with social workers.

This is my one and only school in Dragon Valley, in the middle of the day, with NRaas Tagger showing all sim tags in Map View. There are no traffic jams, foot stomping, or route failures at or around 9am thanks to the Additional Entry/Exit mod already linked to. This is a mod that I helped beta test, by the way. There are a lot of doors all around this school rabbithole shell building and they all get used as entry points, so everything runs smoothly each morning with each arriving child/teen heading for the next available door to use in turn. If I didn't have or want this mod, or if the student population were to double again from where it is now at around 34 (that's already over the capacity of most schools in an unmodded game), I would build them a second or maybe even a third school and take over the school registrations myself or use NRaas SP and GoHere to do so. Or possibly use the Careers mod's homeschooling and private specialty schools to handle the overflow of kids to be educated and reduce the potential for door crowding. There are many solutions to consider.



There is absolutely no reason to use a Core Mod like Awesome to suppress school assignments unless one really does want to keep kids out of school on an ongoing basis. What might make sense for a sparse, spread out population of a town set in the sixteenth century and still very early in its development where it could take too many sim hours to travel across the countryside to a schoolhouse and back will not necessarily translate to the most useful of solutions for those playing in other situations.

And the social workers don't come anywhere near sims I care about because I don't allow children and younger to suffer or miss school enough for that to happen. Anything unexpected can happen in this game, we know things can go wrong, children can be branded as being mistreated or not attending school when there is no real reason for any of it. But that's what finding out why it happened, quitting, reverting to a prior save, and replaying things a different way are for.

The thing is, the kids and teens get on the bus, I check every one and make sure their lazy plumbob is actually on the bus, but sometimes when I look later they're standing outside of their own home not in front of the school and their stats say skipping school while their grades plummet.
I guess I'll be using the boarding schools and the school choices in the NRAAS mod more often. It's not that many kids/teens actually. Just three or four that I first started having the problem with then it was just two of the teens. Most of them have aged up into young adults, but I still worry about the issue occurring again.
I experienced had occasions where I found them skipping school and they get in trouble by an adult in the house. One time I even had the grandma (who lives with them) stop her work at the school, go outside, and scold every single one of her grandchildren that was waiting outside of the school to get inside. The hold up that time was the grandma taking the time to scold them. Lag doesn't help much either. Of course, I let all of them off by cancelling the moodlet.
I have motives on static so the toddlers shouldn't need to be picked up at all. I don't understand why everyone wants to pick them up as soon as they age up. No one wants to pick up the toddler who is almost child age which is strange. They just insist on cancelling out everything and picking up the toddlers who just aged up, but then they just stand around and do nothing. This issue seems to stop when I put a book in front of the toddlers.
I had the eldest toddler playing in the backyard while everyone was enjoying playtime on spooky day, (no trick or treating anymore most of the time they succeed at one house and the rest are either unoccupied or no one is home or the game crashes), and when I sent them inside to go to bed I forgot to have someone get her too. When I realized that I forgot her, the sim I sent outside to get her autonomously put her down three times and I had to repeat the command each time before they would actually carry the toddler inside and put her on the floor and not on the ground.
I guess I got used to the toddlers climbing the steps in sims 4 and forgot that it's not in sims 3. But that's okay. No I don't miss playing sims 4...much.

I once had a father drag his child out of school to scold him for skipping school and then give him time out so he had to stand outside the school all day then get scolded and grounded for skipping school. I got a mod to let me control if a child or teen gets scolded and that solved my problem permanently.

"simgirl542;c-16572306" wrote:
The thing is, the kids and teens get on the bus, I check every one and make sure their lazy plumbob is actually on the bus, but sometimes when I look later they're standing outside of their own home not in front of the school and their stats say skipping school while their grades plummet.

The school bus is just a means of transportation. I would have wanted to follow the kid to school or at least check on them after the bus would have arrived to drop them off to see what happens next. If you focus 100% of your time on the active home lot and totally ignore the world around you, then you aren't playing TS3 and you should have your game taken away from you. >:)

Okay of course I am just kidding, we all have different play styles. But tossing the kids on the bus and then not bothering to check on them throughout the day doesn't match mine. :)

I often disable the buses anyway by way of NRaas SP or Buzzler's Moar Interactions mod and make the kids find other ways to get to and from school. Same with carpools for actives employed in rabbithole careers, but it depends on the world and the household. Boarding schools are, for me, a non-starter. I let my sims have kids, lots of them and too many in some cases, because I love helping to raise them, not so that I can send them away for sim weeks at a time. Others of course feel differently.

"nickibitsward;c-16572867" wrote:
If you don't place a school in your town what happens? Does the school bus not come and they just not go? I love worlds like Dragon Valley but that darn bus always annoys me, it doesn't fit in.

Again, then get rid of the bus (does require a mod) and give your town's kids some bicycles or other form of transport. But if there are no schools in town, then there are no school buses and no pushes to go to school or punishments for skipping because there are no schools to go to. Also no opportunities or wishes related to education, no proms or graduations, kids won't have anywhere to go daily to be forced to learn senseless conformity (or math) each day and be fed a barely edible school lunch. This is really what you want for the upcoming generations? As a taxpayer whose hard work funds such services, I would be appalled at such a notion. :p

The first issue is that you should be directing them to take care of the babies and to not just pick toddlers up and hold them.
The second issue can be caused by either a child from an inactive family being taken away by the social worker and causing rabbit holes to burp sims out like when I had that in older saves and those were ones that had become corrupted or it can be an overcrowded school if it's just happening at the school and that one would need awsomemod with the automated school assingment overide enabled in the config file if you want to actually stop issues from even happening to the schools as this solution is for preventing these issues.I use Mods to remove the NPC social workers and have story progression configured to run like the one in TS2 to control the population growth.There are other Mods that help if overcrowding does happen in schools if it's a minor case and awsome would prevent it from happening as you'd have to enroll all children and kids in school manually as they won't attend before being enrolled.

I've had to use Mods to fix school issues as it once led to a child being taken by a social worker and that save was lost after it got so corrupted that it coded and vanished.I also started playing my towns from a new settlement started in an empty world and gradually add families over time so the town will take a few generations to grow.I use AwesomeMod because I wanted to prevent the issues with schools like overcrowding,routing fails on entry,routing fails in transit,students attending wrong schools and the mess is causes with saves.I got the no social workers Mod so they can't take a child away for failing school as I plan to use playable social workers instead so a child can be taken away without it causing the save to get corrupted and becoming unplayable.It can also affect babies not being looked after by parents as those get taken away if it goes on too long.

If you don't place a school in your town what happens? Does the school bus not come and they just not go? I love worlds like Dragon Valley but that darn bus always annoys me, it doesn't fit in.

@simgirl542 I've seen sims get to school, then turn around and go home (or perhaps play on the playground) when they can't get in the building. It's probably like any other situation where the route fails or the object is blocked—the action gets cancelled, and the sim is free to do something else. Most sims standing around town with nothing in their action queues will autonomously go home sooner or later unless there's an attractive sim or object (like a dumpster, unfortunately) nearby.

As far as the scolding goes, I've been using nraas DebugEnabler (thanks to igazor's suggestion) to wipe otherwise non cancellable actions from my sims' queues. I'd think it would work here too (maybe it would need to be applied to the kids as well as the adult), and it doesn't reset the sim the way MC or even the cheat console would. The sim stays in place or at the most hops a square or two to the side.