MERIDEN - As principal Miguel Cardona greeted the students gathering for the first day of classes outside Hanover School Monday morning, several of the parents could be seen wiping tears from their eyes.

Others, like David Lewis, joked that he didn't mind sending his daughter, Ally, off for her first day of fifth grade.

"My vacation has just begun," he said, accepting the playful swat his daughter gave him with a grin.

Ally, who was entering her final year at the school, said while she wasn't happy about summer ending, she was excited to get started.

Around the school, at 208 Main St. in South Meriden, the situation was much the same.

In the pre-kindergarten class of teacher Carolyn Datchuck, children fidgeted on the rug of the classroom, alternating their gaze between their parents, who were lining the edge of the class, and their teacher, who ran them through a welcoming song.

"Welcome to school today," she sang. "Rise and shine ... we're so glad you're here."

"Before you know it," she told the class, "you'll be singing it in your sleep."

Later she started associating letters of the alphabet with pictorial representations of animals and objects, which were part of the rug the children were sitting on.

Not far off, the students in Lincoln Middle School, 164 Centennial Ave., were also meeting their teachers and being told what was expected of them.

In the class of music teacher Mark Renner, students weren't yet at the electronic keyboards lined up on desks and hooked into computers around the room, but were gathered around him to hear how they were to treat the expensive equipment and what their attitudes should be.

When Renner was a student, he had avoided academic work as much as possible, skipping classes and concentrating on music.

"I couldn't stand being in the classroom," he said. "I was a horrible student."

Now he wishes he had someone in his life to keep him on track and learning, he said, which he tries to do for students.

As the school day ended for the high school students at Maloney around 2 p.m., teenagers gathered outside while they waited for their buses, complaining about classes they disliked and musing about the year ahead.

Friends Antonio Gomez, who graduated from the school last year but returned to say hello to some friends, and Jessica Boccuzzio, a tenth-grader, shared a hug after seeing each other for the first time in a few months.

Boccuzzio, who is a cheerleader and plays softball for the school, said her summer hadn't been entirely school-free. She still had practices and was regularly at Maloney.

But she didn't mind returning.

"Summer is kind of boring," she said.

Ciera Ellison, a ninth-grader who was waiting for a ride from her mom, said she was excited to get started.

"There's a lot more freedom," she said of the change from middle school to high school. "...I think I like it a lot."

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