Star Tribune
On the last day of high school, a slow tractor roll into a bright future for these Minnesota seniors
FOLEY, Minn. — It was the last day of senior year. The first day of everything that comes next.
At Foley High School, that could mean only one thing.
Tractor Day.
The first tractors rumbled into the high school parking lot early Friday morning. Dozens followed. Sparkling clean, decked with balloons and streamers, pulling trailers loaded with laughing teenagers on hay bales.
For decades, high schoolers in this central Minnesota town have rolled to the last day of school at the lowest possible speed, in the grandest possible style.
“It’s a good way to kind of close it out,” said senior Megan Trigg, standing next to a trailer covered in pink balloons and streamers. The tractor ride to school took a leisurely 25 minutes that morning, giving motorists behind them plenty of time to enjoy the jokey sign tied to the back — a riff on the classic line from “Mean Girls”: Get in Losers, We’re Graduating.
Trigg and her friends — Megan Latterell, Gabby Johnson and Gracie Blank — grew up watching the tractors roll through each May. Now it was their turn.
“People come out and wave, people drive by and honk. It’s pretty cool,” Johnson said.
No one seems sure when or why the tradition began. There are other rural high schools that celebrate tractor days. Few do it bigger or better than Foley.
“Wow! A John Deere!” Emily Miller’s youngest son, Beckham, called out, pointing as a vintage green tractor pulled up to the school. As adult volunteers directed traffic, the green tractor joined the orderly rows of parked farm equipment — with the kindergartner excitedly narrating every turn. “Look, Mom!”
Tractor Day is an event for the whole community. Neighbors wave from the curbs. Families head to the high school to watch the fun.
But this day was for the Class of ’23. Seniors like Miller’s older son, Evan, who worked late with his friends on Thursday; getting the tractor ready, putting the final touches on the cutoff jean short-shorts for their group costume.
Seniors hugged, snapped selfies and danced across the parking lot. The airspace over Foley High School filled with arcing water balloons.
The seniors were freshmen in March 2020. Their high school years were marked by pandemic disruptions, distance learning and missed milestones. Give these kids all the water balloons their hearts desire.
“That’s why a lot of us want to do the traditions now so much,” said senior Kristen Drexler, standing with classmates Madelyn Craft, AJ Rahm and Haley Hamilton, sporting matching cowboy hats. “We want to try to get everything in that we had to miss for so many years.”
Foley High Principal Joel Foss estimated that some students had to be on the road as early as 5 a.m. with their slow-moving rigs. A tractor can’t exactly cruise down country roads at 60 miles an hour. Some parents trailed the tractor convoys in their cars, hazard lights flashing.
For the students, Tractor Day is worth the early start and extra effort.
“It’s a farming community and kids like to show off their tractors,” said Noah Lentner, who rode in with friends Ben Lewandowski, Emmit Olson, Alex Wirtzfeld and Mason Arnold.
Students compete for titles like cleanest tractor, smallest tractor, biggest tractor and, of course, best-decorated tractor. The machines were festooned with taxidermy and decoys, sporting llama balloons, draped in American flags.
One student brought a push lawn mower and left it parked next to one of the John Deeres with a sign arguing the case that lawn mowers are just very, very, very small tractors.
There was a trailer decked in rainbows and trans pride flags. There was a tractor waving a Trump 2024 flag. It was Tractor Day in America.
A group of students gathered by the rainbow-draped tractor, keeping an eye on it for the classmates who had decorated it. A few water balloons had been lobbed its way. The Class of ’23 looks out for each other.
“I think it taught me how important friends are,” Craft said.
“Tractor Day is a good get-together with everybody,” she added. “Foley’s a very rural and country place, and we can celebrate in a way that feels like us.”
Star Tribune
Palestinian officials say an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza killed 15
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli strike on a school sheltering the displaced in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza where Israel has been waging a major air and ground operation for more than a week.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the ministry’s emergency unit in northern Gaza, confirmed the toll and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by both militant groups inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings