AS HARPER Holstein walks through the front gates of Booral Public School on Friday, she becomes the sixth consecutive generation in her family to do so.
"I'm looking forward to all of big school," Harper said.
"I like that mum and poppy went to this school too."
Tracing the family tree back one more generation, Harper's history predates the school itself - with her ancestor, William Maytom, starting at the old Booral school in 1850.
"William went to the church school up where Booral used to be," Harper's grandfather, Peter Frost, said.
"I work one day a week up on that property now and we call it the church paddock."
The current school was built in 1865 and in 1873, Mr Frost said, the old church was moved down "brick-by-brick" and installed next to the school in the new township of Booral.
When Mr Frost attended the school - first enrolling in 1964 - there were just two buildings and only one of these was used as a classroom.
He told the Newcastle Herald the family hadn't thought about how long they had been in the area before now.
"We weren't really thinking of it that way. Then we started looking at it more and more and thought 'oh jeez, righto'," Mr Frost said.
But seeing his granddaughter running around the same grounds as his great grandfather did is "special" Mr frost said. His daughter, Harper's mother, agreed.
"It's amazing, looking back at it and the photos it's pretty cool that we're all here and we really resonate with the place," Leeah Holstein said.
"It's also amazing to see how far things have come over that time and is hard to imagine what life would have been like."
Following a similar path to her father Peter, Ms Holstein left Booral at the age of 18 and returned a decade later to raise her family.
"I came back because this is home and this is where my family is," she said.
"It's an amazing place to grow up. The small community and the fact that there's a lot of family around here.
"It's about that connection to the place and knowing that I have people around to support me."
Ms Holstein described Booral Public as a "family school".
She said going back through the history of enrolment to find her own family, she saw the names of many locals still in the area.
Current school principal, Anthony Pearson, said that it is a "real honour" to have families returning to Booral to raise their children.
"It's a community school and there's a real family feel to it. That comes through in the way the kids respect each other and really look after one another," Mr Pearson said.
"Families go away and come back with their children because they value the education that the public system and Booral supports."
Mr Pearson has been at Booral for nine years and in that time he says numbers have grown from 55 to more than 100 students.
There are five classes according to Mr Pearson, one of which is "self-funded" by the school.
"This is to reduce the size of our classrooms and really try to increase the value of the student's education," he said.
"The children having a teacher in front of them is a far better resource than a piece of software or a new piece of machinery.
"This reflects the family and community attitude of Booral - it all comes back to that for us."
Harper said that while she's still excited about starting kindergarten, she's not looking forward to doing the COVID tests twice a week.
