SEARSPORT - At meeting of the Select Board, Tuesday, Chairman Aaron Fethke noted that it felt a little like July. The comment was a reference to the sunlight creeping around the drawn curtains of Union Hall and the fact the Select Board always — really always — meets at 7 p.m.

The room was also filled with schoolchildren, which either made it feel more like summer or less. But in any case, it was for them, a group of two dozen fifth-graders from Searsport Elementary School, that the board met in the middle of the day for the first time that anyone could remember.

Local government was laid bare for the young citizens as Fethke worked his way through a typical agenda, including policy votes on surplus property and waste oil disposal, among other thing. Along way he gave brief explanations of select board procedures and the topics at hand.

To an observer, these might have gone unnoticed, but for Selectman Dick Desmarais, who coordinated the student visit with Searsport Elementary School teacher Mark Quigley, these hints about what was going on were critical.

While growing up in Lowell, Mass., Desmarais recalled going on a similar field trip. What stuck with him wasn’t the nuts and bolts of local government, but the fact that he left the meeting knowing only what his school principal told the class in passing: that the men sitting in the front of the room were city councilors.

“The gavel came down; fifteen minutes later the gavel came down again and they walked off,” Desmarais said. “We could have learned so much.”

His second brush with governance was appreciably better. Then-senator John F. Kennedy came to Lowell and explained government functions in a way that Desmarais said made up for some of the shortcomings of the Lowell City Council, though he still couldn’t have imagined that he would one day hold elected office himself.

“I would have called you crazy,” he said.

Quigley, the teacher, circulated around the room as the board members talked, occasionally tapping a child on the shoulder — a signal to step outside the doors of the meeting hall to be interviewed by a local TV reporter. His students had been studying the history of Penobscot Bay — “the dirty history of Penobscot Bay,” so they were primed for the field trip, he said.

The visitors, indeed, seemed content to be there.

They sucked on bright pink lollipops given out at the start of the meeting and followed along on printed copies of the meeting agenda. They sat through a halting explanation of tax increment financing and listened to a debate on whether to residents’ name should be required on a survey about future economic development initiatives.

Toward the end of the meeting several students stood to take photos, framing the town officers on the screens of school-issued iPads.

One of the photographers was Aurora Arsenault, who said after the selectmen adjourned, said she had enjoyed the meeting. Asked if she could picture herself serving on a town select board, she gave an unreserved “yes.”

Which meant that it didn’t seem like it would be boring?

“No, it doesn’t seem boring to me,” she said.

After the students left, Desmarais said he was looking forward to the possibility of a repeat engagement, maybe on an annual basis. In the meantime, he welcomed a continued dialog with the students who attended Tuesday.

“I would really love to get feedback about what happens when they get back to the classroom,” he said.

By then, they probably were. It was a little after two o’clock and the school isn’t far from Union Hall. Outside the old municipal building, the sun was still shining for some reason.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com