National Arbor Day celebrated

By IAN MINIELLY

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Ironwood — National Arbor Day was Friday. On this day, people around the country plant and dedicate trees to provide oxygen and beautify areas. The Arbor Day foundation even gives away10 free trees for joining, while also providing nursery discounts. Their goal is to make the world cleaner and greener from the back yard to around the world by planting trees where they are needed the most, according to the arborday.org website.

But when is a tree more than an oxygen producing, shade providing, visually stunning floral creation? When individual people say it is. People have been known to plant trees to signify an important birth or death, or even special events like marriage.

People plants trees to grow fruit, shade their house or property, or to break up the sight lines on that same property or to cut down howling winds by the trees wind buffering properties. Trees serve a variety of purposes.

Trees are more than symbolic, they are fruitful, majestic, and sometimes, just plain functional. Michelle Hurlbut, resident of Ironwood, relayed a story about a young girl she went to class with as a kid in Washington State at the John Rodgers Elementary school. John Rodgers, according to Hurlbut, had regular classes, but they also were the elementary school in the Olympia School District that taught the severely disabled students.

At Rodgers, Hurlbut described the classrooms for both types students as being located side by side. The idea in the 1970’s was to enable the like graded students to help with their similarly graded disabled students in the adjoining classroom. The kids would be taught separately, but together in more than just grades.

Back in the mid-1970’s, Hurlbut’s class had a special girl named Theresa in the adjoining classroom. She initially met Theresa in the first grade. The kids in Hurlbut’s class would feed and help out their adjoining class and the kids began forming bonds with their neighboring students.

The school thought Theresa was 100 percent disabled as she was confined to a wheel chair and could only control and move one foot. Theresa was unable to talk and could not communicate at all. Theresa spent half the day in school, the other half of the day she spent with her adoptive parents in physical therapy.

At some point during physical therapy, it was discovered Theresa was only physically disabled; her mind was perfectly able. Her physical body had caged her in silence for years and Theresa had been unable to express her status or condition because she could only control her foot. No one knew how to communicate with her or that she even could. It took years before someone figured out Theresa’s mind was more than functional, it was exceptional.

A machine was engineered and attached to Theresa’s foot and hooked up to a monitor that displayed what she typed. The world around Theresa was finally opened up through language and she could express the words in her mind to the world around her.

The school moved Theresa out of the disabled and handicapped class and into the regular classroom. In the regular classroom, the kids addressed all of Theresa’s needs, and she became a typical student. The way Hurlbut describes it, Theresa, through only the use of her foot, was able to type extremely fast and engage in conversations and learn with the rest of the students.

Theresa spent first grade in the disabled children’s classroom attached to Hurlbut’s class, but she spent second and third with Hurlbut and the other kids. By the end of third grade, Theresa began missing more and more school. Her body was in bad shape and there were many days she could not safely go to school, needing full-time care and attention from skilled medical personal.

Theresa’s adoptive mother Candy invited the whole grade to their house for Theresa’s birthday. Every kid in the grade showed up and they stayed up all night playing the Bee Gee’s, dancing, and eating lots of candy.

“I remember riding with our mother to pick my sister up from this party. She says she had a great time.”

Theresa died shortly after her birthday, which happened around Arbor Day nearly 40 years ago. Theresa’s adoptive parents chose a couple of her best friends, Hurlbut being one of them, to plant a memory tree in the court yard out front of the class room, where Theresa was accepted as just one of the kids. The local newspaper took a picture of the tree and the students planting it and the school put a plaque in the ground to commemorate this most special student and her friends.

The Daily Globe reached out to the Olympia School District. The John Rodgers school is no longer in use. It has become excess storage for the district, but the tree, in memory of Theresa, is still there. Sometimes a tree is much more than a tree, it is a memory.