Hoda Kotb showed up for her daughters’ first day of school on Sept. 8 with Joel Schiffman beside her, turning a routine drop-off into a family reunion. The former couple walked Haley and Hope into the school year together, even though they ended their engagement in 2022.
Kotb posted photos of the moment on Instagram and kept the message short: “It’s here,” she wrote, followed by, “4th and 2nd grade! Whaaaatttt?” In the pictures, she wore a blue Denver Broncos sweatshirt and white jeans, while Schiffman wore a gray suit. Haley was dressed in a striped T-shirt dress with all-white sneakers, and Hope wore a tiered floral frock, a denim jacket and running shoes with pink laces.
The photos mattered because they put Kotb’s post into the middle of a real family milestone. Haley and Hope are now in 4th grade and 2nd grade, and Kotb has said before that Schiffman is the reason she has the two girls. She adopted Haley in 2017 and Hope in 2019, years after she and Schiffman had already become a couple.
That history gives the image extra weight. Kotb and Schiffman were together for eight years before breaking up in 2022, but she has described the split as amicable and has said they remain on friendly terms as co-parents. On a 2024 episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show, she called Schiffman one of the best people she knows and said growing at different paces helped end the relationship. In a 2022 interview with People, she said she did not regret a day, a minute or a second of their time together.
What remains unclear is whether this school drop-off was a one-off reunion or just another stop in a co-parenting routine they have already settled into. Kotb has previously said they alternate weekends, with Schiffman taking Saturday and she taking Sunday, and that he takes the girls out for fun while she gets some quiet time. However often they appear together, Sept. 8 showed a former couple making the start of school feel normal for their children, and that may be the clearest sign of how their family now works.
