MISQUAH — The floors at Oakview Elementary were waxed last week, which is the custodians’ way of announcing the season, and Barb Nyberg was in the building before they were properly dry, which is hers. Mrs. Nyberg teaches the third grade. She has taught it for twenty-three Septembers, will open her twenty-fourth in Room 6 in six weeks, and spent Wednesday morning laying one picture book on each desk — not to assign them, she clarified, but to walk the room the way a third-grader walks it, which is desk to desk, and see what the room says back.

“It’s called being on time,” she said, of the calendar generally.

The ritual is annual and exact. The bulletin-board paper goes up first, in colors she chooses when the paper tells her. The reading corner gets rotated a quarter turn, on the theory that a room should be familiar but not identical, “like a grandmother’s kitchen.” The name tags wait: the class list is an August document, “and I have learned not to argue with August.” The tape, however, is cut, and lies in a row on the desk blotter like place settings.

What is different this year arrives in the numbers. The library’s summer program enrolled a record forty-one readers, as reported in these pages, and a healthy share of them are headed for the third grade. Mrs. Nyberg has adjusted the shelf accordingly, moving a row of chapter books down to where third-grade hands reach without asking. “They’ll come in reading,” she said. “The trick is to act like you expected it.”

She will have company in the building soon enough. The district’s three fall hires — a science teacher from away, a band director already conducting within earshot of most of the town, and an elementary teacher presently minding the library desk — have each been advised, in Mrs. Nyberg’s general direction if not by name, of the standard being set on the first floor. Superintendent Dale Brandt, reached for comment, declined to referee. “You can’t run a school on hope,” he said, “but Barb runs hers on Scotch tape and a six-week head start, and I have never once worried about Room 6.”

The first bell rings the Tuesday after Labor Day. Mrs. Nyberg is aware of the interval and untroubled by it. Asked what she does with a room that is ready in July, she looked down the rows of desks, each with its book, squared one that did not need squaring, and said she mostly comes in and reads.