MISQUAH — The first bell rang at 8:10 Wednesday morning, five days before Labor Day, and by every measure the district keeps, the day went the way first days go: 412 students, no bus later than nine minutes, one kindergartner who would not let go of a mother’s sleeve until 8:40 and who was fine by 8:50.

Then the week did what this year’s calendar made it do. Three days of school. A holiday. And then this morning, a Tuesday that a good many people described as a second first day.

It is the first pre–Labor Day opening in district history, permitted by a temporary state-law exception the board voted in March to use, not unanimously. Minnesota has required a post–Labor Day start since 1985; because the holiday fell on September 7 this year, the Legislature allowed boards to open any day from September 1, this school year and next.

What actually happened. Attendance Wednesday was 96 percent. This morning it was 91 — the difference being three 4-H families driving home from the State Fair, one household that misread the calendar in the honest direction and kept a child home Friday, and the ordinary early-September flu. Eleven students arrived late this morning, nine more than the district’s five-year average for a Tuesday.

Superintendent Dale Brandt has a theory. “They had a Monday off and their bodies think today is Monday,” he said. “So do mine. I have signed two things this morning with the wrong date on them.”

The buses. Routes ran published times all three days and were adjusted over the weekend, as transportation said in August they would be. The east-side run lost four minutes; the Loon Ridge Road run gained two. Three families on the County 6 stretch had children at the road eleven minutes early Wednesday, which the office attributes to first-day nerves rather than the schedule. The stop that moved last spring has still moved — a sentence this newspaper has now printed in four consecutive editions at the request of nobody.

In the rooms. Kindergarten ran half days Wednesday through Friday, thirty-one children across two sections, and goes to full days today. Barb Nyberg opened her twenty-fourth September in the third grade in Room 6 the way she has opened the other twenty-three: with one picture book laid on every desk before the children came in, a different book on each desk, chosen in August from what she knows about the family, never assigned and never explained. “They pick it up or they don’t,” she said. “That is the whole test and it is not a test.”

Asked whether the earlier start changed anything in her room, Nyberg said the room does not care what the date is, and that the children were quiet Wednesday, fine Thursday, and themselves by Friday, which is loud, and which is the same schedule they have kept since 2002.

What the parents said. Reaction at the curb Wednesday ran, by this newspaper’s unscientific count of eleven conversations, about seven to four in favor of getting on with it. “I have two in this building and a boat that comes out of the water the second week of October,” said one father, who asked that his name not be used because his wife works for the district. “August is when we do the lake. I understand the June argument. I lost the June argument.” Another parent said she had braced for chaos and gotten a normal Wednesday, and felt slightly cheated of a grievance.

Whether it worked. Nobody can answer that until June, which Brandt volunteered before this newspaper asked. “Ask me the second week of June,” he said. “If we’re done and it’s pleasant out and nobody is teaching a math lesson to twenty-six children who can hear a lawnmower, I’ll say it worked. That is the whole case. It is a June case.”

The board takes up the 2027 calendar in the spring. Renée Fontaine, who lost the last week of August at Loon Ridge and said in March that she would, has already asked the district when that meeting is.