tvOS12 orphaned and fails to update to latest tvOS version

At our school district we have 52 apple TV gen 1 4k. We currently have all of them orphaned on tvOS12. We found and confirmed by Apple education support that you cannot update from tvOS12 to another tvOS update, without going to tvOS13 first. This is a required progressive step update. The problem lies when you try to update your atv from tvOS12 it will not offer up tvOS13 with any sort of consistency. It will offer up the latest update, which at this time is tvOS18.2. If you try to install tvOS18 from tvOS12 it will fail every time. So the trick is to reset and restore your atv several times, (apple not aware of exactly how many attempts needed) until tvOS offers up tvOS13 as an option. Once you have tvOS13 installed you can only then move on to update to the latest tvOS. This is confirmed by Apple. So now we have to figure out a workflow to do this random reset/restore attempts 52 times. Uggh!