There may be a week left in summer holidays, but soon Manitoba schools will be filled with students.

Before the bell officially rings, hours of work need to go into prepping the building itself, and most of that work is done by teachers.

Lindsey Noel is a grade 4 teacher at École Assiniboine School. She expects to put in two full weeks to ready her classroom for her 23 students.

"I'm not quite ready yet,” she said. “I still have a lot to do."

On her first day back to school the task at hand was cleaning up two months’ worth of dust.

"All of the shelving units, all the tables, everything that I could find that needed to be dusted."

Noel is an 11 year veteran teacher, she knows what she’s doing.

Her calendar is already filled out, her welcome back bulletin board is nearly complete and name cards are ready to be placed on desks.

However, setting up the classroom is just the first step. Once that is done Noel moves on to lesson planning, which needs to include new curriculum and new strategies that will work for this year’s class.

"You always have to make sure that you know your students and know what their needs are in order to be able to have a successful lesson," she said.

Ray Desautels, president of the St. James Assiniboia Teachers' Association, said many people don’t know just how many hours go in to getting ready for the school year.

"Most of the teaching work happens after the kids go home, at night, on weekends and in the holidays," he said.

Desautels added many educators work all through the summer accumulating resources for the new year, and often bring in family members to help them set up as the first day of classes draws closer.

He said one of the biggest challenges is being ready to attend to each child’s special needs and making them feel comfortable in the classroom.

"It's no longer everyone sits in a row and raises their hand very nicely and says, ‘please and thank you, may I go to the washroom.’ It's a challenge managing the classroom and it's a challenge teaching the classroom," he said.

Kindergarten teacher Terry Scharrette is getting ready to face that challenge for the first time. This will be his first year as a permanent teacher.

"It's exciting, it's just a lot of work. That's the bottom line, it's a lot of busy work," he said. “I know I am going to be flying by the seat of my pants to a certain point. I'll be honest."

His classroom is nearly ready for his class of 16, and he has ideas for his lesson plans from research he did over the summer.

Scharrette has also been working with veteran teachers, who will be mentoring him throughout the year.

"I really think that keeps me somewhat balanced and off edge knowing that I am being supported by my school and by the staff here."

With the prep work not yet complete, Scharrette said he can’t afford to take the long weekend off.

"I just know there is a certain amount of personal sacrifice that comes along with this and it's one of those small sacrifices that I'm simply going to have to live with,” he said.

The first day of classes for early and middle aged students in the St. James-Assiniboia School Division is Sept. 9.