The daylilies are out, pouting, just in time for the last day of school. A boy dragging a backpack runs a hand along the top of a wooden fence, the rail a racetrack, his hand the racecar. He stops to inspect morning glories—purple, fleshy, wet—and then holds up his hand: crawling over his skin, three tiny green bugs await their fate. “Aphids,” he says. “Because of the rain.” He smiles. He is missing a tooth.

The first graders at our neighborhood public school have been studying insects. He likes inchworms best. He finds aphids unworthy. (“They’re mean.”) But summer can make a boy woozy with possibility, and even mercy. He nudges the bugs from his finger to a flower and wipes his hand on his pants. Amnesty.

There will be breakfasts, in classrooms, for families. In the first grader’s room, twenty-one children will eat forty-two hard-boiled eggs, two watermelon, six pints of strawberries, and three dozen donuts, trucked in by parents on their way to work. There will be orange juice on the table next to the ant farm, between the butterfly tent and the terrarium for Franklin, a Russian tortoise who has been known to escape to the rug in the reading corner. There won’t be enough coffee for the grownups, but no one will mind.

After school, there will be an end-of-year party for the older kids: pizza, ice cream. Fifth graders will sing karaoke, but the only CD will be Adele, and, at this, the seventh graders will smirk.

This year, the fifth graders, who are studying civics, each wrote a letter to the mayor. “Dear Mayor,” one ten-year-old wrote. “It has come to my attention that a problem has arisen.” He wanted the city to put up a new traffic light to make the walk to school safer. The mayor never wrote back, not to a single kid.

It has been a hard year. The older kids won’t be coming back to this school, not even to the vegetable garden in the courtyard that they helped build when they were younger, carrying sprouts on the school bus and helping their parents push wheelbarrows of dirt from their back yards. This isn’t just the last day of the school year, it’s the last day of this school, a school founded as an experiment in the nineteen-seventies, an outgrowth of the civil-rights movement, an integrated urban school, celebrating justice and democracy. It lasted for a long time, but, last year, the city decided to reorganize the school district—dismantling the K-8 schools and opening junior high schools—for the sake of “innovation.” But, all over the country, in this Paul Ryan-era of austerity, innovations in public education are generally about cutting costs, or making it easier for people with money to send their kids to private school, leeching resources from public schools.

Over the summer, legislators will mercilessly cut school budgets, and politicians will make speeches about the state of American public education. Two Presidential nominating conventions will be held. The budget debates will be boring and the speeches will be unhelpful. In the courtyard, the garden will need watering.

Meanwhile, teachers will clean their classrooms, scrub the windows and paint the walls (they’ll pay for the paint with money they don’t have), because the schools can’t afford to hire anyone to do these things. This ought to be a scandal, but it's has been going on for so long that people seem to be used to it. When I was a kid, my father would go to our school in the summer to sweep, mop, and wax the floors, room by room, hall by hall, week after week. He would bring his pipe, a bag of a tobacco, and a transistor radio, and smoke, sweep, mop, wax, and listen to baseball.

School would have lasted longer this year, except that there weren’t any snow days. Next week, at the end of the last day, the teachers will send home paper grocery bags stuffed with the beautiful clutter of a year’s worth of knowledge: The first graders’ dioramas (horseshoe crabs on the beach, Io orbiting Jupiter), the fifth graders’ spiral-bound writing journals (poems about peace, essays about the Antarctic), the seventh graders’ report cards (the quiz on osmosis, the attitude in French). No one will know what to do with any of it. You can’t just throw it away.

Illustration by Kris Mukai.