It’s that time of year again. Parents quietly rejoice; their children loudly lament – it is the beginning of another school year. Children don their crisp new clothes and trade the freedom of summer for structured school days.

Sept. 9 marked the first day of the new year for students of the Cazenovia Central School District. Construction crews worked tirelessly this summer at Burton Street Elementary, Green Street Middle School and the high school. While the high school still has a few projects visibly underway, all obtrusive construction has wrapped up at Burton Street, where minor renovations continue nightly. At Burton Street, weighty outdated windows panels have been replaced, student bathrooms have been updated, old carpets have been replaced with tile flooring and the sidewalks have been improved at both the front and back entrances.

Mary-Ann MacIntosh has been Burton Street’s Principal for the past seven years, and could not wait to get back to school this year. She says her favorite part about the start of a new school year is the students themselves.

“It’s always exciting to see them, to see how they’ve changed and how excited they are to come back,” MacIntosh said.

MacIntosh oversees 580 students spanning kindergarten through fourth grade, and said she thankfully hasn’t had to have any disciplinary conversations with “visitors” to her office yet.

MacIntosh outlined her personal goals for the upcoming year. She wishes to have all the students reading on grade level by the end of the year. How will she achieve this goal?

By “working with the teachers to identify where students’ weaknesses are, and what we need to do, to help those struggling readers,” she said.

While memories of summer still linger in children’s thoughts, a visit to Catharine Taylor’s first grade classroom found a number of students excited and energetic for the new school year. Many of the seven year olds miss riding their bikes, fishing and swimming in the warm weather, but said they were happy to come back to school. Not many children said they were afraid or upset to come back, but a few admitted that they’d been finding it hard to sit still sometimes.

One might expect first graders’ favorite things to be “recess” and “lunch,” but Taylor’s students were much more excited about academics. Several students said their favorite thing about the first grade was learning more about science, math, and writing.

The children were all smiles and felt very excited to now be staying at school for the full six hours, riding the buses with the big kids. While this means they spend more time in the classroom, this also means they spend more time on the playground, which is alright with them.

Taylor’s lesson for the afternoon included outlining appropriate rules for the rest of the year, and having the students write them down in their booklets for future reference. The children were encouraged to think up some of their own suggestions for rules and their minds were firing on all cylinders.

The students suggested possible guidelines ranging from “be nice to others” to “don’t talk on the phone while driving.” While the latter didn’t directly apply to the classroom, everyone agreed it was a good rule, in general.

The children anxiously anticipate Halloween, excitedly describing their exploits roaming the neighborhoods as candy collectors. Their costume ideas are just as exotic as anyone would expect, but what was surprising was the professions the students imagined themselves stepping into after school. Instead of a room full of astronauts and ninjas, the first graders of Burton Street Elementary wish to become teachers themselves, principals, policemen, doctors and maybe even professional fishermen.

Pierce Smith graduated Cazenovia High School in 2005 and attended Marist College in Poughkeepsie. He majored in communications with a concentration in radio/TV/film. He graduated in 2009 and worked as a promotions coordinator for radio stations within Cumulus Media’s Hudson Valley branch.