BACK TO THE BOOKS

MAT-SU — The daily ballet has begun again — school parking lots fill up for no more than 20 minutes in the morning and the afternoon; backpacks and lunchboxes swirl through the door.

Thursday was the first day of school for the Mat-Su Borough School District. And, at least to hear the principals tell it, school staff didn’t lose any of their skills over the summer. The first day went off without a hitch.

“It went extremely smooth,” Brooke Kelly, principal of Goose Bay Elementary, said of the process of getting kids through the door and into the classrooms. She couldn’t speak for the rest of the day; speaking as she was just before 9:30 a.m.

“The first day is going wonderfully,” Susan McCauley, principal of the brand-new Birchtree Charter School said at about mid-day.

“It was a great start,” Palmer High School Principal Wolfgang Winter said about an hour before his school was set to dismiss. There were no hiccups he said, then re-thought that. “I shouldn’t say no hiccups at all. There are always hiccups. But nothing that was insurmountable.”

Kelly said that returning students likely wouldn’t see a lot of change. There weren’t any new teachers this year.

“We’re pretty much the same a last year and glad to be that way,” she said.

McCauley, whose school went from an idea to a reality in the course of one summer, said that she and the organizers got to breathe a sigh of relief Thursday. But there’s no time to take a break.

“It feels like the closure to the almost two years of planning to get to this day but it’s definitely a beginning,” she said; a beginning for this school year and those to come.

The first day there were concerns about how cars would move in and out of the parking lot. Those worries proved unfounded. After a summer’s worth of activity, the school itself is complete, she said. The only piece left is one of the lawns, which was hydro-seeded recently and is roped off.

“That has restricted the area that we have right now for recess,” McCauley said. But the school sits on 14 acres so there are plenty of other places for kids to explore.

Which is good because Birchtree is K-7 and, unlike their counterparts in traditional middle schools, even the sixth and seventh graders get recess.

In his address for the opening day ceremony, Winter pointed out a few of the school’s recent accomplishments — being the only one of the three largest Valley high schools to meet its performance goals on state testing and making Newsweek’s list of the best high schools in the country.

“Although it’s nice to get the accolades we’ve gotten over the past year, I am not satisfied, and a lot of improvement is possible,” he told the students. “I challenge you to make that Newsweek list again. I challenge you to improve those test scores even higher.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.