Grade kg-5 Teachers

2nd Grade

Claudia Koberstein

Email Mrs. Koberstein

City honors Arbor Day by planting tree

Written by Holyoke Enterprise

Thursday, 07 May 2009 11:29 Students in Claudia Koberstein’s second grade class helped city workers plant a tree at Holyoke City Park on Monday, May 4 in honor of Arbor Day, as mayor David Nygaard and City Supt. Mark Brown look on. The City of Holyoke also donated blue spruce seedlings to each second grader in an effort to encourage the importance of trees to the environment.

The first Arbor Day took place April 10, 1872 in Nebraska, the brainchild of Julius Sterling Morton. Morton was a Nebraska journalist and politician who worked to improve agricultural techniques in his adopted state and throughout the United States when he served as President Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of Agriculture. But his most important legacy is Arbor Day.

Morton felt Nebraska’s landscape and economy would benefit from the wide-scale planting of trees, and set an example himself planting orchards, shade trees and wind breaks on his own farm and urging neighbors to follow suit. In 1970, President Richard Nixon proclaimed the last Friday in April as National Arbor Day