MISQUAH — Seventh grade began Wednesday with three empty desks in the same row, which the district had known about since July and which is the most visible consequence in this building of a school calendar that now begins before Labor Day.

Maren, Greta and Liv Vekved were in St. Paul with a dairy calf, a four-year-old cow and a market steer. They showed Wednesday and Thursday, loaded out Thursday afternoon, and were home at 11:40 that night. All three were in class Friday morning at 8:10.

The absences were excused on the standard form, as State Fair absences have been for decades. The missed work went down with them in a folder — their mother reports two of the three folders came home in the same condition they left in, and declines to say which two.

Superintendent Dale Brandt, asked whether two days is a lot to miss in the first week: “It is. It is also two days out of a hundred and seventy, spent standing in a ring in front of a judge from Todd County, and I have never once had a 4-H kid come back behind in anything but spelling.”

Their teacher reports the three of them came in Friday, sat down, and were — by the standards of a seventh-grade classroom on the third day of school — unremarkable. Greta Vekved had been asked about the cow eleven times by lunch and had stopped elaborating by the fourth.