Give Me My Summer Back!

It’s hard to tell whether the Times thinks this is cute or if it’s some sort of commentary on the state of the education system:

Across the city, the first morning of school brought scenes of ritual and unpredictable tumult at the city’s more than 1,400 public schools. Because of the most recent teachers’ contract, schools opened the day after Labor Day for the first time in memory.

Beyond the usual frustrations over late school buses, enrollment confusion and long lines outside schools with metal detectors, there were no reports of widespread problems.

On the steps of P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights, Zeke Merlis tried to make sense of a tangled crowd of television camera crews that had shown up for his first day of kindergarten. He wondered aloud if they were headed for his class. Assured that the cameras were there only for the mayor, Zeke had another question.

“Daddy,” he asked, “what’s the mayor?”

Then there’s this tautology:

Chancellor [Joel] Klein, seeming chipper at the start of his fifth school year, made his traditional tour of schools in each borough. After joining the mayor at P.S. 8, he visited P.S. 31 in Staten Island, where he highlighted the expansion of a program for gifted and talented students. Then he zipped back to Manhattan, to Girls Preparatory Charter School, where he asked a first grader what she liked about going to an all-girls school.

“Because it’s all girls!” she exclaimed.

Meanwhile, other timeless back-to-school traditions were repeated:

The president of the city teachers’ union, Randi Weingarten, and a large cast of Democratic politicians, including the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, held a news conference outside P.S. 89 in TriBeCa to call yet again for smaller classes.

“We’re all excited about the first day of school,” said Robert Jackson, the chairman of the Council’s Education Committee. “But teachers are not excited about having 34 kids in a class.”

. . .

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, some students waited more than an hour to get through the metal detectors. The line stretched from the building’s front doors, down scores of stone steps to the sidewalk along Highland Avenue. “It’s like we’re criminals,” said Resee Brown, 17, a senior at Hillcrest. “We understand it’s to protect us, but there should be more scanners.”