Photographs of children on the first day of a new school year have a particular energy about them, with a mix of excitement and jitters — sometimes even a touch of dread — all swirling around in tiny bodies. Also, they’re so cute!  So for the first day of school in New York City on Wednesday, the Metro desk wanted to take advantage of our incredible photo archives here at The Times, by picking one photograph from each of the past several decades, beginning with the 1940s, and sprinkling in some history to go along with them.  Metro’s photo editor, Jessie Schwartz, was in charge of the photographs (my favorite is the exceptionally bored looking boy from 1957), and because I cover education, I was tasked with finding some historical context for each picture. I checked in with a couple of education historians who made suggestions on where to focus, but most of the information that ended up in the piece came from old Times articles.  Late Wednesday morning, after the story had been sitting on the home page for a few hours, I received an email from a reader named Harry Stanton, who recognized a little boy in one of the pictures.  “The boy with the Star Wars lunch box in 1980 is my son, Michael Stanton,” the elder Mr. Stanton wrote. “I have never seen that picture and fell off my chair this morning when it came up on my screen. Thank you many times over for the memory.  “Oh yeah,” he continued, “the laughing in his office will probably continue through lunch.”  Today, the younger Mr. Stanton, now 41, is the head of strategy and communications at a bond insurance company in New York City. He was starting second grade in that 1980 photograph, he said. His teacher that year was Mrs. Bernstein.  As it turns out, the Stantons also have a New York Times connection. Michael Stanton said that in the 1950s, his grandfather, Donald Colgan, was an executive assistant to Orvil E. Dryfoos, who went on to become the publisher.  This assignment was especially fun for me, not only because it’s a treat to know where people end up so many years later, but also because when I think back on my own most vivid memory of the first day of school, I think of a photograph: It is of my mother with her arm around me on the day I started first grade. I am draped in a blue uniform, a big bow in my hair, and she is crouched down beside me, balancing on high heels.  A colleague who has two children told me today that, often, it is not the kids who tear up on the first day of school, it is their parents.
While many kids head back to class this week, Elizabeth A. Harris, an education reporter, looked back at the first day of school over the last several decades.