Each year, Ethel A. Jacobsen Elementary School teacher Lisa Boyd familiarizes her preschool students with the life cycle of the monarch butterfly as the species migrates through New Jersey. The class also raises a few of the colorful creatures outside the school building, in Surf City. Fall, of course, “is well known for the flurry of children returning to school,” Boyd stated, but “it also heralds the annual migration of monarch butterflies to warm climates for overwintering.”

So far this season, the children have released four butterflies, “and await the emergence of two chrysalis,” said Boyd.