CHICAGO, ILL. — The first thing a kindergartner does on the first day of school is not open a book. It is eat a square cookie shaped like homework, which is how Crumbl has been running its “Back to School Week” since last night, a limited-time menu that runs through the end of the week and treats the school year as a snack.

Crumbl, the cookie chain that has, at various points in the last year, sent its menu on a “Tour of Europe” and declared entire weeks of limited-time offerings with the gravity of a moonshot, has decided that the most important thing about the start of the school year is that the cookies should look like the things school is about to do to your child.

"I don't even like school. But this cookie made me want to do my multiplication tables. I did them. Twice."

That’s from a second grader at the Crumbl on a busy Chicago strip, who was accompanied by a mother who said the family’s entire back-to-school errand list had been reordered around the cookie. “We did the shoes. We did the backpack. Then we did the cookie, and I am not going to lie, the cookie was the easiest part of the day.”

A third grader at the same location, asked whether she was excited for school, paused for a full three seconds and said, “I’m excited for the cookie. School is coming second, and I want that on the record.” A teacher who stopped by between classes said she brought a box for her staff room and that “the room has been more productive since the cookies arrived, and I don’t say that about the smartboards.”

The limited-time lineup, which rotates on the chain’s usual weekly schedule, has already produced the local phenomenon of parents using the cookie as a behavior tool. “Finish your backpack and you get a cookie,” one mom explained, before adding, “It’s not a bribe. It’s a system.” A local principal, when asked about students citing the cookie as motivation, said the district was “aware of the program” and that “the office has never had more cookies in it at once.”

BACK TO SCHOOL WEEK: OFFICIAL SYLLABUS

  • Subject: Dessert, square-shaped, in rotation
  • Term: One week, ending the 29th
  • Attendance: Required for the cookie, optional for the school
  • Homework: None, per the cookie's curriculum
  • Parent-teacher conferences: Held in line, at 4:15
  • Report card: The cookie, in every grade

At press time, the line outside the Chicago location was still out the door, and a father holding two coffees and a half-eaten cookie said his daughter had asked if the school started on time. “I told her the cookie starts on time,” he said. “I think that’s all she needed to know.”