The spectacle at the bus loop at Creekside Elementary School on Friday is a ritual that repeats itself at all Suffolk schools on the last day of the instructional year.

The buses lined up inside the loop in an orderly fashion. Their drivers climbed down to swap their plans for the summer.

A few teachers and other staff members waited just inside the doors, having the same conversations.

Then it was time. The doors opened and the children came — first a trickle, then a flood of smiling faces eager to leave classrooms behind for a while.

Someone broke out the silly string, and it was flying through the air indiscriminately. Someone else produced pom-poms, and she took great delight in shaking them.

Several more folks joined the silly string brigade, and it became nearly impossible to avoid the intersecting trajectories of it.

Oh, people were also blowing bubbles. No one had one of those new-fangled bubble guns, but there was a lot of manual bubble-production going on — children and adults pursing their lips and blowing softly on their bubble wands, before dunking them back into the refill bottle.

When the buses were full, they roared off in the 90-plus-degree heat, past rows of staff and faculty waving farewell and cheering from the curb.

The kids on the buses stuck their shoulders, arms and heads out the windows — not dangerously, though — and waved and cheered back.

One could conclude those on the buses and those on the ground don’t like each other all that much — they were a little too happy to be parting ways. But on closer reflection, that wasn’t the case: Everyone was just celebrating together.

When the last bus had turned onto Bennett’s Creek Park Road toward Shoulder’s Hill Road, the faculty and staff members headed inside and called it another year.

Though many of them may not be totally fancy-free for the foreseeable future. The school district has amped up its elementary summer school, and a few will be helping out with that — or other worthy endeavors.

The students, they might also not all have been contemplating months of video games, bike riding and sandcastles. Think of the plethora of different camps, helping out around the house, maybe even getting a head start on next year’s curriculum or reviewing the one just completed.

Or, indeed, attending that expanded summer school.