All over Australia this month, students will finish classes for the year, but in a small hamlet near Ballarat, school's out for the school itself - forever.
On Friday, St Michael's primary at Springbank, which has just 14 pupils, is closing after 146 years at the heart of the community.
Principal Michael Kennedy said the 11 enrolments for 2017 were right on the Catholic education office's minimum. Student numbers have been falling, so it was decided the school would close.
When it opened in 1870, as Ormond Catholic School, in the bush 15 kilometres east of Ballarat, it had 90 students, rising to 190 in 1875, their parents working in nearby gold mines and sawmills.
Today it's a potato and cattle district, but farms are bigger, with fewer staff. Locals are having fewer children.
Springbank has no shops, and the post office and pub are long gone.
But it's a very close community. The Springbank Tigers won the Central Highlands football premiership this year and volunteers keep the graceful church next to the school looking immaculate, the classrooms cleaned and roses pruned.
Last Saturday, more than 500 former St Michael's students and relatives attended a reunion mass, and a party that continued until 3am.
Nicole Toohey, mother of pupils Gabriella, 10 and Hannah, 8, is "devastated" that the institution that has educated four generations of her husband's Toohey clan is closing.
The scale of activities might be bigger in Ballarat schools where many of the 14 are heading, but she never felt her kids were worse off at St Michael's, with its Japanese, music, art and sport programs.
Mr Kennedy said there had been tears earlier in the year when the closure was announced, but he wanted to make the last days of St Michael's happy ones. On Monday, students cycled to Moorabool Reservoir for a picnic. On Wednesday, there was a mass and graduation ceremony for the six grade sixers, followed by supper.
On Friday students will go to a Geelong water park.
Margaret Hanrahan's grandchildren Billy and Ellie Hanrahan and Tess Rafter are among the last St Michael's students. Mrs Hanrahan's father Thomas Kennedy and grandfather Patrick Kennedy were also pupils here.
When Mrs Hanrahan, 78, attended in the 1940s, she walked the 2 kilometres to school, and classmates rode horses.
She wrote with chalk on slates (her grandchildren have iPads). There were 80 students in two rooms. There was no air conditioning, and the nuns, who taught here from 1909 to 1986, would strap anyone misbehaving.
But it was a happy time. She is sad the school six of her grandchildren attended is closing "but it's a sign of the times, isn't it, in the country?"