Can’t follow teen sims to highschool

I loaded up my game today and suddenly there is no pop-up asking if I want to follow my teen sims to high school or send them alone. When I played yesterday I could join them, but not today. 8am comes and they simply head off to school on their own.

I have 3 teens on the lot as the only playable characters (they are runaways with their own homestead.)

I do have high school mods in my game. When I first found this issue, I immediately turned the mods off to see if that would fix it. It did not, so I kept them off and repaired the game. This also did not work.

I did not find another report on this, but hopefully it can be fixed soon. My sims story needs me to join them to progress, unfortunately. :(