After almost three months of summer break, the students of Pike Liberal Arts School returned to classrooms on Friday.

Students in grades four-year-old kindergarten through fourth grade met for a quick meet and greet with the parents and students while the fifth through 12th grades tested a new schedule until noon on Friday. Fifth-grader Jake Sikes transferred to Pike Liberal Arts from Covenant Christian School for his fourth grade year.

“I’m definitely excited,” Sikes said. “I’m not nervous at all. My school was a little, tiny, no lunchroom school. This one is way bigger.”

Natalie Ferraro, a fifth- and sixth-grade science teacher for Pike Liberal Arts, said teachers prepared a lot for the first day of school, but said they moved fast once everyone got back into the swing of things.

“A lot goes in to it, because you re-do your room,” Ferraro said. “You do all new bulletin boards. You have to put new names on everything. You want everything to have a fresh look for the kids. You try to come up with new things for the kids to do for the year. Once you get back in the back to school mode, you’re just full speed ahead.”

Ferraro also said she had looked forward to seeing all of her new students on the first day.

“All of the new smiling faces, the eagerness on the kids,” Ferraro said. “They’re all so excited. They come in with all their new things and ready to learn. The beginning of the year is a lot of fun.”

This will be Becky Baggett’s first year as headmaster at Pike Liberal Arts, but she said she was eager to get the school year underway. The school recently added another four-year-old kindergarten class and even made changes to the high school curriculum.

“I’ve been an assistant here for two years, so I’m pretty used to the routine,” Baggett said. “Well, we’ve made some changes to our high school curriculum making it a little more difficult. We’ve added a K4. We had to hire new staff for that classroom too.”

The word for the year for Pike Liberal Arts is ‘team,’ and Baggett said she was eager to see how well the school did in the upcoming year.

“Our word for the year is ‘team,’” Baggett said. “Together everybody achieves more. We all look forward to working together as a team. The sky is the limit.”