I should think that her lovely and well-thought out way of ridding herself of a vector for complaints about negligent, thoughtless and insensitive parenting would have been something a lot like "Let's send April to boarding school in England and have Elly whine because she preferred the company of Aunt Phyllis's family to her 'loving' parents and siblings."

As for Molly and Gayle, quietly disappearing them seems to have given Tom Batiuk ideas for how to deal with a younger generation of characters he can't relate to. Les's daughter and her classmates might as well have never been born in the first place because the order of the day is his ranting about fake comic books and fake fodder for MST3K, why Hollywood is loaded with venal monsters and how mothers who don't realize that their sole purpose in life is to gaze in awe as they gleefully wait hand and foot on a spoiled little shit stuffing his gob with milk and cookies as he dulls his brain reading DC Comics are evil abusive psychotic monsters.