A tree grows at Kent Center School

KENT — Kent Center School has expanded its enrollment from young humans to young hardwood trees — well, to one new tree in particular. The fledgling sugar maple planted at the center of the school’s grassy roundabout in honor of the April 28 Arbor Day celebration might be a bit far from the classrooms to become a true tree of knowledge, but in the years that follow it will provide plenty of shade (and perhaps syrup) to Kent Center students. 

Arbor Day might seem like a fairly innocuous day, even with its global reach. Though the day of commemorative tree planting is observed from China to the Czech Republic, the town of Kent might appreciate it most of all, as it marks the work of one of its most influential homegrown heroes.

 In the Kent Center gymnasium, where the whole of the school and the faculty gathered after the planting of the sugar maple (joined by members of the Kent Conservation Commission and Kent Garden Club), students took turns stepping up to the podium and lifting their heads up to a microphone to recite the history of the town’s own Birdsey Grant Nothrop — “The Father of Arbor Day.”

Northop, born in Kent and educated at Yale, was not the creator of Arbor Day; that distinction is given to a 19th-century governor of Nebraska. But he was responsible for much of how the holiday is observed in the present day, tying in two crucial factors (especially at KCS): ceremony and school children. 

As was explained by the student presenters, Northop worked with the state Legislature to make Arbor Day an annually recognized school celebration where Connecticut children would gather together to give life to one new tree. He would later campaign to bring Arbor Day to schools across the whole of the United States, as well as Canada, Europe and Asia. 

Continuing in the spirit of Northop, Kent Center School makes yearly strides to “reuse, reduce and recycle” and this Arbor Day the school announced that it has partnered with the Kent Memorial Library in joining the Crayola Color Cycle Program, a nationwide initiative in which schools can send in old and used markers to be repurposed by Crayola. Since December, the Kent community has collected more than 1,000 markers. In keeping with the school’s artistically themed environmental action, students from each grade then presented their posters for the Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority’s annual recycling billboard contest, and with a dramatic flourish, pulled away black curtains lining the gymnasium’s wall to reveal a series of student-painted murals that will continue to hang there through May.