MISQUAH — Lakeside School District will welcome three new teachers this fall, the school board confirmed Monday, filling two retirements and a mid-career move with hires the district spent the spring courting and, in two cases, recruiting back from the lives they had left town to build.

The new science teacher is Paul Reardon, who comes from a larger district downstate and will take the middle- and high-school sections; he cited, among his reasons for moving north, “class sizes I can fit in my head” and “a commute measured in minutes.” The new band director is Hannah Moe, a 2014 Lakeside graduate returning from the Cities, and the new elementary teacher is Megan Tollefson, a 2017 graduate and — the paper discloses, in the interest of the transparency it demands of others — a niece of this newspaper’s editor, a connection the editor learned of, with everyone else, when the board read the names aloud.

That two of the three are returning graduates is, Superintendent Dale Brandt said, “the entire point, frankly, and the only number on the page that matters.” Small towns export their young and hope a handful find their way home; Lakeside, this year, landed two in a single hiring cycle. “You can’t run a school on hope,” Brandt said. “You need budgets and buses and a roof that holds. But you also can’t run one without hope, and this week, for once, the spreadsheet and the hope were the same two names. I’ll take that. I’ll take that every year they’ll let me.”

Moe inherits the band program from Phil Brekke, who is retiring after thirty-one years — a tenure long enough that he directed the parents, and in two cases the grandparents, of some of his incoming students. She also inherits a uniform closet last inventoried in 2009 and the standing, non-negotiable, older-than-anyone expectation that the Pike marching band anchors the Fourth of July parade. Asked whether she was ready, Moe said she had marched in that parade herself, as a sophomore, in a uniform that may well still be in the closet. “I know exactly what I’m walking into,” she said, “which is more than most new jobs let you say, and I’m walking into it on purpose.”