School starts next week
School may not begin until next week, but teachers already are busy preparing.
"Look around," first grade teacher Michelle Adkins said Tuesday as she was applying name tags to her pupils' lockers in the east corridor of Marion Elementary School. "Everyone's been here working all week. It doesn't happen overnight."
Indeed it doesn't, as the numerous boxes, stacked-up desks and general clutter of a whole year's worth of audio-visual aids seemed to decorate cabinets, floors and nearly every other flat surface in the school Tuesday.
By next week, the collective chaos will become a bit more organized. Even the pupils will be organized. Every student from kindergartner on gets his or her own locker.
"I don't know what we'd do without them," Adkins said. "With books and coats and P.E. shoes and all the rest, they need a place to keep all that stuff."
Pupils and their parents were to learn homeroom assignments today, although there can be some adjusting afterward. Adkins' class — one of two first grade classrooms this year — will have 16 pupils, which she said was near an ideal size.
On the other side of the original school building, in the south corridor of the elementary school, Sheila Baldwin was busy finding a giant "stay sharp" pencil for Beth Schobert to use on her classroom door. Both teach third grade.
"I usually use the pencil at the end of the year," Trapp confided, "but you can use it at the start. They'll never remember."
Schobert also borrowed a big "welcome" sign from Trapp and was seeing whether the two could fit together into something more novel than a replay of last year's end-of-school decorations.
Marion Elementary will have three classes of third graders this year.
Aug. 14 will be the first day of school for kindergartners through seventh graders, for ninth graders, and for new pupils. Others will start Aug. 15.
