Everybody has a bad day every once in a while. Just ask the KU and K-State basketball teams. We had a doozey ourselves last week, especially regarding stories about schools.

Losing track of a note that Marion High School’s spring musical event had been delayed until this Thursday and Friday, we stupidly ran a story mentioning the original, week-earlier dates for the much-anticipated production of “If a Man Answers.”

Worse yet, we got into trouble worthy of the Cat in the Hat when we tried to put together what was supposed to be a funny little story about Marion Elementary kids’ reactions to eating green eggs and ham in honor of Dr. Seuss’ books.

Rather than asking a teacher, as we should have, we made the mistake of asking kids as young as age 5 to tell us their names and spell them for us. We’ve spent most of a week since then trying to unravel the chaos that ensued. “Quenton Taylor,” we have learned, is actually Caleb Lollar. “Tyler Zadis” is actually Kyler Davis. Even Tuesday morning when a reporter went classroom-to-classroom with the principal to finally make sure the names were right, it didn’t go as smoothly as it could have to figure out that the other children in the story were Wyatt Helmer, Trever Schafers, Colten Gormley, Bailey Claremont, and Cadence Moffett.

Like the normally high-flying basketball teams, we’re deeply embarrassed by our performance and hope to learn from it lest we repeat our errors. We can’t promise perfect newspapers every week, but we can promise that no one will be more upset than we are by any mistakes we make. Although perfection is an impossible goal, you deserve a perfect newspaper each week. Last week, we wrote 54,637 words — as many words as are in an average novel. Even if 99.9 percent of our words were perfect, that would leave 55 that weren’t. And 55 is far more errors than we’re willing to accept.

What we hope you will accept is our apology for not doing our homework on our school stories well enough last week. Rest assured we take our errors seriously, and we’ll try to do much better in the future.

— ERIC MEYER