Need help with a school drama plotline

I'm having difficulty coming up with a solid plotline due to constantly second guessing how effective it will be. I mostly go for fantasy and adventure so a drama is turning out difficult for me to really pin down.

The basics are a new student arrives at a high end school but due to his presence there being extremely new worthy he gets sucked into the problems of those around him. The problem is what should be the major anchoring problem, an existing situation that he would end up getting drawn into.

For more detail, there's a lot of fantasy set up involved. Humans have gone through a strange event they don't fully understand yet where a lot of people vanished and multiple unknown giant gates appeared around the planet. And very quickly, they met what was on the other side... Dinosaur people. They have their own culture and have similarities to humans so after some years they decide to exchange a few families of scientists and researchers for diplomacy. This causes the main character to have a lot of pressure on him both as a student and an unofficial diplomat and celebrity by an entire race that's not sure what humans really are. Culture clashes, biological differences, and there's the mystery of how all this happened.

I've gotten all that world building down well enough, but this has to be about the small battles in the midst of massive changes, how the little things and individual struggles still matter. So I need a very solid main drama to anchor it all but I've not been going to school for a very long time and all I have to work with are movies, fuzzy memories, and GTO.

Any help on good school plotlines or problems would be appreciated. Go wild. Feel free to ask about the worldbuilding if you think more info would be helpful.