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School Starts a Week From Wednesday, Before Labor Day, for the First Time Anyone Here Can Remember
The board voted in March under a temporary state waiver. The superintendent says the alternative was teaching into mid-June. The resort says it is the difference between a season and most of one. Both of them are right, which is what makes it hard.
MISQUAH — Lakeside opens Wednesday, September 2 — five days before Labor Day, which falls on September 7 this year — and it will be the first time in the district’s history that the doors open before the holiday.
The mechanism is a temporary state waiver. Minnesota has required a post–Labor Day start since 1985, at the tourism industry’s urging, but with the holiday falling late in 2026 and 2027 the Legislature gave school boards a two-year option to begin any day from September 1 on. Lakeside’s board took it in March, on a 4–2 vote, after two meetings and one long open-comment period.
Superintendent Dale Brandt’s case is arithmetic and he makes it without apology. “Start after a September seventh Labor Day and you are teaching the second week of June,” he said. “June is not school. Ask anybody who has tried to teach fractions on the tenth of June with the windows open. We gain a week we can actually use, and we get days back in February when we need them.”
Renée Fontaine’s case is a calendar of a different kind. Loon Ridge Resort books its last full week of the season in the days before Labor Day, and the industry’s statewide testimony has been consistent for thirty years: families are roughly half as likely to book an August vacation when school has already started. “We have ten weeks to be a business,” Fontaine said. “The last one is not a bonus week. It’s the one that decides what kind of winter I have. I understand what Dale is protecting. I would like somebody to say out loud that it is being paid for by about nine businesses on this Chain.”
Then there is the third collision, which nobody voted on: the State Fair runs Thursday through Labor Day, and eleven Misquah 4-H members and seven animals will be in St. Paul during what are now school days. The district has issued excused absences and sent the work along, and the barn regards the whole thing as this year’s one sour note. The board revisits the question next spring for 2027, when Labor Day falls on the sixth. Both Brandt and Fontaine say they expect to be at that meeting. Both said it in the same tone.
