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A smile lit up Cliff Scholl’s face as he greeted Lisa Gruman’s second-grade class in the lobby of the Morse Young Child Magnet School on Dec. 11. For the fourth year since the City of Poughkeepsie donated a Colorado blue spruce to Hulme Park in honor of his daughter Katie, Scholl was on hand to retrieve the ornaments that the students had spent weeks handcrafting from recycled material.
However, this year Scholl had another reason to smile.
“This is the first year we got a whole class to come out and decorate the tree,” Scholl said as the students began to line up single-file.
With snowflakes constructed from discarded paper, the 19 exuberant students marched hand in hand through the City of Poughkeepsie, their caroling brightening the dreary winter day. Bringing up the procession, the Scholls, Cliff and his wife Charlotte, sang along with the children as a police escort led the way toward a particularly poignant Christmas tree.
Dubbed “Katie’s Tree,” the spruce nestled at the edge of Hulme Park at the corner of Church and Market streets, was dedicated to Katie Scholl in 2003. An avid environmentalist, poet and world peace advocate, Scholl entered AmeriCorps upon graduating college, working as a part of the Clean and Green Team in Poughkeepsie. During that time, Scholl often worked closely with Morse Young Child Magnet School students, teaching them about the planting of seeds and plants, the care of the plants and how to grow their own food. Scholl was also a major proponent of recycling.
“Her big thing was recycling and the environment,” said Charlotte Scholl, jingling a set of Christmas bells as she crossed the street. A park ranger herself, Charlotte and her husband Cliff, a member of the community service-based Kiwanis Club of Poughkeepsie, instilled in Katie a love of the world and its natural resources that would follow her throughout her life.
“She liked to give back to the community and the kids whatever, whenever she could,” said Charlotte.
Though cancer claimed Katie’s life in 1998, her message still lives on through the children at the school where she once taught. For weeks, each child spent class time with Patricia Solomon, the school’s art teacher, crafting ornaments out of old plastic cup tops, used construction paper and felt to create a sparkling array of crafts with which to adorn the tree.
“It’s a learning experience for the students on many levels,” said Nancy Miller, public relations officer for the school district. “They learn about the environment and to think about how to reuse things. These are lessons that will follow them through life.”
As the procession entered the park, cocoa and a pile of handcrafted ornaments adorned the table that greeted the exuberant group. With little prompting, each child grabbed an ornament and rushed toward the tree, small hands outstretched as they grappled for the nearest empty branch. The Scholls, beaming from ear to ear, stood back and took a moment to watch as the tree bearing their daughter’s name slowly became more and more complete.
