My teacher died of old age and all my students were kicked out. As far as I know, 'uneducated' people can never go back to school.
How can I prevent students from being kicked out?
Can I 'queue' a replacement teacher in such a case?
If the teacher dies of old age students were kicked out
banished
Related Solutions
The reason you can't trade your items with the merchant is because they have a trade value of 0. Certain merchants won't accept certain kinds of good for trade, and so the value of those goods will be set to 0 when trading with them. An example of this is herbs, which a lot of merchants won't accept for trade, but food merchants will.
Managing population fluctuations, both local and city-wide, is one of the biggest challenges of Banished. But with the right technique, it isn't one which can't be overcome.
When you need some household to migrate to another location, build a new house for them in the new location and just before the new house is finished, order their old house to get removed. They will then become homeless and migrate to the new house the moment it is finished.
Single households are in fact quite handy in this regard, because they give you a higher flexibility (you can move a single worker and don't have to move two at the same time). The downside is, of course, that more houses require more resources to build and more fuel to keep warm.
As a result of population fluctuations you will soon notice that workers who used to live close to their jobs will switch jobs and have suddenly a new job which is far more remote. To solve this issue you should regularly (every couple years) unassign all jobs by making everyone laborers and then reassign the desired number of workers to each occupation, starting with those where you consider proximity most critical. When you add a worker to an occupation, the laborer closest to an open job of that occupation will be converted, so by reassigning regularly you can re-optimize who does which job.
Best Answer
If you do not have any available laborers then the job will remain empty until there is one avilable.
If you notice, when someone holding a job dies, there are 2 messages in the log:
Unfortunately you are correct that once the students leave the school they become "Uneducated" laborers and will not return to school. This is due to children and students becoming laborers at the ages of 10 and 17-18 respectively. When a child reaches the age of 10 they have to be either a student or a laborer. If there is no available school, or the school is full, the child goes straight to laborer.
To prevent something like this happening you should always have a few laborers available to mitigate deaths. If you're truly short on workers, try pulling a few people out of jobs that aren't being worked currently. Usually I keep 2 people in builder even when I don't have a build job going and I let my Blacksmiths/Tailors/Woodcutters come and go as my supplies bounce against the cap. Some of these jobs are good to remove in order to have available laborers in times of desperation.