MISQUAH — Mrs. Halvorsen’s third-grade class at Oakview Elementary released forty-one rainbow trout fingerlings into Big Pelican on Thursday morning, completing a school-year project that began in September with a tank of eggs and ended, for several students, in open and unembarrassed tears.

The class raised the trout from eggs supplied by the Department of Natural Resources through its Trout in the Classroom program, monitoring water temperature daily, feeding the fish on a rotating schedule of student “trout monitors,” and charting their growth on a length of butcher paper by the coat hooks. Of an original count near fifty, forty-one survived to release — a respectable rate, the DNR liaison noted, and a number every child in the room could recite, along with the names of the ones that didn’t make it.

The release, at the public landing, was a solemn affair. Despite Mrs. Halvorsen’s repeated and increasingly firm guidance over the year, a number of students had named their fish, which complicated the goodbye considerably. A moment of silence was observed for one trout, “Speckles,” lost in March under circumstances the class agreed not to revisit. The surviving forty-one were carried to the water in relays of paper cups and tipped in, to applause and a few held hands.

“We learned about the water cycle,” reported student Brynn Solberg, who attended despite having finished third grade two years ago and being present, she explained, “for support, because the first time is hard.” “And we learned you’re not supposed to name them. We named them. You name them anyway. That’s the part they don’t tell you.” Mrs. Halvorsen said the fingerlings have “a hard road” ahead but that several students had already asked to come back and check on them — a plan she gently discouraged, the fish being now “out there, living their lives, as we discussed, at length, on Thursday.”