 Thanks for coming. My name is Debbie Kelly. I'm with the Missouri Alternative Center. Also, I work with small farms, beginning farmers, and also I'm the stair coordinator, one of them for the state of Missouri. I'm gonna be moderating this session, and I'm very happy to present you with some students from Maplewood Richmond Heights Middle School who have going to be presenting aquaponic farmers, building a new interest in satisfying the appetites of the future. And so I'm really excited to hear what these young people have to say about us in farming. So guys, go ahead. Hi, my name is Bill Hensky, and I'm actually their science teacher, and I'm kind of filling in for their principal today who was kind of the impetus for this project. And I'm gonna give you a little bit of background first on our school district and our school and why we're doing some of the things that seem strange to some people, why we're doing those as a regular part of what we do every day. So this is a map of where our school is, relative to us. We're in that little blip-out where St. Louis is, and from St. Louis we are right on the outside of St. Louis. So we're an urban core suburb. We're totally surrounded by development and housing. There's no open or green space, save small city parks and MSD right-of-ways where they've kind of taken property for stormwater management. So opportunities for our students to get outside have always been really limited and they've always had a really urban kind of childhood where they have experiences that consist of playing in streets and yards. There's not a lot of country experience. So about 12 years ago, our school was one of the failing schools you might have heard about if you were anywhere in the country in the last 10 or 15 years. Test scores were really bad. Attendance in our high school was down under 200 from a capacity of 400. A lot of the kids who lived in the district would not go to school there. Parents would not send their kids to our schools. And for good reason, the test scores were terrible. The facilities were really bad and morale was really low. The curriculum that we were using in school was pretty much the same curriculum they had been using since the 1950s. Really old school, really old facilities, really low morale with not just the students but also the teachers, the parents. And we really had no connection whatsoever to the community around us. When we talk about that nowadays, we talk about the sustainability of a system. Our school system was not sustainable at all. And what happened is we had to come to a decision and decide what we're gonna do with the school system. We knew we weren't serving the kids. We weren't serving the community. So either we were only serving ourselves or we weren't serving anyone. And what happened is a lot of community leaders came together and they decided that they weren't gonna just give up. And they decided to totally revamp the way that we did things. One of the first things they did is they decided each school in the district needed to have a metaphor, an underlying understanding of the way and why we did the things that we did. And the middle school, which we're all a part of, became a school as expedition. And what that meant was the classroom wasn't gonna be confined to that building. It wasn't gonna be confined to that neighborhood. It wasn't gonna be confined to that community. It was going to be the entire world. If we wanted our students to get out of school and go places and be full partners in the society that we were telling them that they were a part of, we had to give them the training to do that. They had to practice doing that and they had to understand the kind of connections that they could have to the world around them. So along with that metaphor, we came up with four cornerstones that we teach within our school. The first one is stewardship and responsibility. And you'll kind of see as we get into some of our programs how a lot of these connected up together. Now the purpose of these was to get a unifying thread throughout the whole school. And it could have been something else. To be perfectly honest, we had nothing before. So by going to school as an expedition, it gave us something to hang everything on to. So when we start to talk about the programs and then down the road aquaponics, we're really talking about how do we do education in a meaningful way? How do we do education in a way that connects what we're doing to what needs to be done in the world around us? What the challenges are that people outside of the school are facing? What people perhaps even on the other side of the world might be facing. So we have a series of what we call enduring understandings. The first is that as stewards of our world and resources, we impact the future. What we're trying to help students understand and even as we ourselves are coming to understand it, we're responsible for the world that we live in. We don't just live in it as witnesses. We don't just go there as contestants or as visitors or watchers. We're an active part in controlling what goes on. And so by creating this mentality and fostering this metaphor, the students and the teachers and the parents all can really see how the school and what we do there connects in a real way to the world around us. One of the really nice things about our school district is the fact that we're a truly diverse community. With that, there's always a lot of challenges that come from diversity. You have a lot of systems that are coming together that weren't necessarily made to fit together and we'll kind of talk about some of these challenges. When we talk about how are we gonna create real life experiences in an institution that's been built to be homogeneous for a long time and managed to be homogeneous for a long time to give everyone equal and fair services over a long time, we have to kind of pull apart some of those things to actually get things to work the way we need them to in the 21st century. So our enduring understanding about diverse perspectives, providing opportunities, it's really just a statement of the fact that this is a really good and strong thing that we have. And diversity could be the best thing that we have. And even though it causes or presents challenges to us, it's the diversity itself that makes us particularly special or unique. And so this is yet another thing though that we decided as a school district and as a community, we're gonna look towards to draw our inspiration or our strength from. Thanks. And then the last was collaboration and community. Collaboration, if anyone's familiar with 21st century skills. These are concepts about what it is students in growing up in this century, being educated for jobs that haven't been created yet or in some cases even imagined yet are gonna have to be able to do. And collaboration with teams working together and communicating is gonna be one of those really big skills that are essential to be successful in the 21st century. So underneath each EU, we have some essential questions. And these are the kinds of concepts that we want students to be able to talk about. Not just at a student level, but you can tell they're really grown up big questions. These are things that we want students to be able to discuss with each other. And they're things that don't always have one answer. They're things that are really broad questions that are gonna come from having lots of different and varied experiences that traditional schools really weren't providing. Thanks Will. So changing an entire school district and all the inertia that goes with having this really old organization that's been working the way it has been for a long time requires a little bit extra movement to get that going. And this has probably been the most questioned part about the way that we've done things and the way that we've kind of turned around our own school district and the way that the people around us see us and the way we're treated by community members and community partners. And that is how did you get the change to go? How did you get from something with a whole lot of institutional inertia like a really traditional old school district that's been doing the same thing for a long time? How did you get to move? And there was that philosophy that I just told you about. So first building that philosophy and making those connections to it and then saying, okay, now this is what we all agree to. We all agree that learning is to be done for and in the real world. And those connections that students make have to be to something real, to something that's gonna affect their lives. So that's kind of the basic background for the sustainability programs that we have and then the aquaponics program that we'll talk about in a little bit. So within our students, so we had a long tradition of not doing a great job at allowing students the opportunity to become the leaders that they are. So the purpose of bringing our students here today is to give them another opportunity to be in a leadership position. They know more about aquaponics than I do. They know more about, quite a few subjects actually now. Jamie knows more about bees than me, for example. So they're gonna talk a little bit about aquaponics in a few minutes and I want you guys to feel free to ask them some questions. A lot of this stuff has actually come from student questions and student interests. So some of the programs may seem non-traditional, but they're really geared towards meeting the needs of those students as they kind of fill into those leadership positions and see the needs that are in the world today. One of the major paradigm shifts in the way that we've been teaching to kind of get students to that understanding is a process called systems thinking. This is a very non-linear approach to thinking about problems, whether they'd be mathematical, scientific writing and reading, or broad social problems. So as we've kind of gone through... And I had just sent a couple texts to my principal about what breed he wanted and he has not responded yet. So I think he's picturing us bringing back all these chickens in the school minivan and what that's gonna look like. But that's the kind of experience that the students are used to and they see no problem with that. They see no problem with asking the questions why and it kind of comes from the process of the way that we give instruction. The instruction is not top down at all. The students are part of that instruction. So this graphic, it shows a reinforcing loop. A reinforcing loop is where one variable is actually, when it increases, it's causing an increase in another variable which then goes back and feeds back into the original variable. So what we've actually created is a reinforcing loop in education where the students now are actually reinforcing their own learning. They're reinforcing their own development and leadership. Okay, I'm gonna let Ms. Breed, our garden coordinator and she has a really full title, which I'll let her explain. And she's gonna talk a little bit about some of the sustainability programs. Hi, my name is Melissa Breed Parks and yeah, I am the seated table garden coordinator. So one thing, we've been talking a lot about sustainability in a lot of different aspects in our school and trying to put those all together in a really practical way. Part of the expeditionary learning is about learning hands on, kinesthetic learning. It seems like a lot of people learn that way and a lot of schools haven't taught that way. So we're trying to get our kids out and actually doing stuff. So one thing is our school has had the seat to table program for I think five or six years now. And so that has encompassed starting gardens at all of the, from preschool until this last spring we built our final garden in high school. So preschool, elementary, middle and high school all have gardens now. We try to serve fresh, healthy food in our school lunches as part of the program. Two of our schools have chickens and our middle school is getting kind of a small backyard style chicken coop and doing research into keeping a database on chickens in the neighborhood. So Maplewood, Richmond Heights is an urban area but it's becoming a very popular thing to keep backyard chickens. So there's about I think a four chicken limit. So we're keeping a database of and we have students called chickenologists that are learning how to steward the chickens and also teach people how to keep them in their backyards. So we have, this is our middle school garden. And so yeah, this garden has been there for I think five years. The soil fertility is really high. We just last spring built an herb spiral. It's kind of a demonstration about microclimate and a lot, it's kind of a, it's a permaculture idea but just talking about like some of the Mediterranean herbs like it higher where it's a little more dry and it gets more sun and then some other herbs would be in the back, there's a little pond and so the water condenses as it, the lower down you get. So just to kind of teach some little small things we have little spots for that. And this, I can't see very well, but just we've been planting, like working on planting, inter-planting different crops together. We have some blueberries along there and this summer was record heat but we had a ground cover of sweet potatoes which really helped keep the soil cool for the blueberries. So this garden here was really productive, really beautiful, it was south facing so we grew all things that love the heat and tolerate drought. And in the back there are some orange flowers. We do a lot of integration with all of our different classes, our core curriculum classes. So for instance, like the sunflowers bring in pollinators. So every year Mr. Hinsky has done a study with his students where they'll watch a flower for five minutes and count how many times it's visited by a pollinator. And so over the years we can keep data on which plants bring in more pollinators and which pollinators do we have in our gardens and we actually, we'll talk about our bees pretty soon, we have several beehives at our school. And like I said, it offers an opportunity for kinesthetic learning. So there's, you know, we have an afterschool garden club and also we're out there in different classes like in the seventh grade science class this year, we did a study on the soil food web and so we actually dug a small hole and each classroom had their own spot and they picked out all the macro invertebrates with tweezers and counted how many they had and worked on their data tables as something they were learning beginning seventh grade science and how to present their data. And then just talking about how the soil is alive and how that creates fertility and helps feed the plants in the garden. So just kind of tying it all in together. There's another unit we're doing for our social studies class, George Washington Carver was the native of Missouri and so we're doing kind of a history talking about him. We've grown really amazing crops of sweet potatoes this year. We had about 200 pounds of sweet potatoes with our dry hot summer. And we also grew peanuts for the first time. So those were two of his specialty crops that he found about 200 uses for. So we're gonna be looking into that as kind of the beginning of an ethnobotany, like cultural uses of plants and have kids discover their own cultural uses from their cultures of what plants they use and looking at different plants in supermarkets, what in different products. So that's how we're kind of tying things in. And then just recently we started growing mushrooms. We're growing shiitake or oyster mushrooms. We were growing them and here we're starting in newspapers, phone books and old textbooks, which I'm not sure how well it's gonna work. We'll see. But the newspaper ones seem to be doing really well. They're all colonized by mycelium and then we have a few logs, mushroom logs in the garden also that the kids drilled and inoculated with dowel plugs. So let me have you and I move on. Yeah, do you wanna talk about the bees or I can keep talking here? Can you talk about the bees? Yeah, you wanna talk? Okay. I'm gonna talk about the bee program that we have at our school. We have three hives. We used to have four, but one of them wasn't doing very well. So we combined it with another hive. So now we have two regular sized hives and one pretty big hive. And we also started a top bar hive which was with these bee hives, there's a frame. It's a rectangle, a wooden rectangle with wax in the middle already. And the bees just build off of that. But the top bar hive, it's just a bar and a little bit of wax on the top of the bar and the bees can just make their wax off of that and build it however they want. And they kind of all died at once. And so that one didn't work very well but everything else has been doing really well. We've gotten lots of honey. We've been selling it as our blue devil bee honey. We've been making chapstick and other stuff with it that's more marketing, I'm with production. And we also have a viewing hive in our building which is, yep, right there. And it's glass, so you can look at the bees and see how they're doing what they're doing and look in for observation. And also the window that goes, we were going to drill a hole through the wall but they didn't like that. So we drilled the hole through the window and we needed to get some strong windows or else just sawing through the glass would shatter the entire glass. So we had to get new windows and it worked, that's working as well. We're not going to be harvesting from that hive or else we'll release bees into the entire school. And we've, yeah, those are bees. Oh, so, oh, I can jump in. Oh, no, that's all you, that's all you. Oh, well, so we've been working on a lot of a different community outreach and community connections. These are photographs from a project that we've done a couple of times now where we partner with a restaurant in our town and donate some of our produce to them and in exchange they will do a demonstration of cooking. So we're bringing down our produce, we have leeks and carrots and stuff and then the chef taught us how to make pickles. Last year we brought our sweet potatoes and we had a big feast of sweet potato-crusted catfish on a bed of our greens. We sprinkled with deep fried kale and the kids still ask me about that. They really liked it, so if you wanna get kids to eat kale all you have to do is deep fry it. But so we've also done, like this year we started selling at the farmer's market, the kids. So learning about economics, like Jamie was talking about with some of our bee products. Learning about how, you know, just, okay, so we have a product now and learning about sustainable economics to triple bottom lines. Like how do we not only make a profit but also protect the planet and help people? So it's the social, the economic and the environmental aspects. Let's see, what's next? Oh, and then we also have a kitchen where we can do practice cooking some of our things. We had a camp this summer where we had a gardening and cooking and in the cool morning we would go and work in the garden and harvest and then learn how to cook our actual, you know, the actual things that we grew. So that's another thing we've definitely seen that kids who they are actually growing, the vegetables themselves, they're much more likely to eat them. So nutrition is something that our whole district has focused on. We have our cafeteria, we have a chef for our district and our cafeteria has been focused on serving healthy school lunches for a number of years now and it seems great. I mean, the food that we serve is real food, you know, we'll have roast chicken and greens and sweet potatoes and we'll have like a real meal. And it also seems like, you know, not only is it's getting kids used to eating healthy food and how to, you know, with the teen kitchen learning how to prepare it, but, you know, our attention in the afternoon is much higher than if they just ate junk for lunch. So it's definitely been a really big success. Yeah, we can, so we kind of talked about the way that we do instruction and one of the things that we had decided is we wanted to get kids kind of a jump on understanding sustainability and how it relates to the different subjects because ultimately we want them to be citizens in a sustainable community. We didn't want them to do really well in school and then move to a better community or we wanted them to be a part of that thriving community and we wanted everyone to kind of come up together. So one of the things that we worked on is creating a sustainability class and this is one of those things where you, you're really, I was really excited. This is my class, it was super awesome. It's gonna be everything I wanted then I realized I can actually do this with every single class. So this is kind of on the way out where we've actually grown beyond this need to have a sustainability class because so many of our classes now are integrating the concepts of systems thinking and kind of thinking about putting these different systems together whether they're economic, social, political, et cetera. And it's kind of gone into, this kind of thinking has gone into all aspects of school. So the next, this slide is my fun thing now which is called Adventure Club and it's basically hey kids, what crazy thing do you wanna try to do? And you'll notice they're really heavily based on outdoor experiences. This is what kids want to do. Rarely do the kids say, can we just sit inside? When you ask them what do you wanna do for an adventure, this is what they want to do. This has kind of gone into a summer class that kids kind of fight over now to enroll in which is a unique experience for any teacher when you're in middle school and the kids are arguing with each other about the last spot in the class and this class is Field Study which is a science class that just happens to be all in the field. There's very little classroom time. There's still lots of work. It just has to be done on site like real field biologists, real geologists. And this is a blast to teach. It's one of my favorite times of the year. In other classes, we have specific projects that have something to do with 21st century challenges like our need for new energy sources. So this is a project that my colleague in science did with his where they investigated different renewable energy sources and they collaborated with Washington University to put on different demonstration projects and then ultimately to put together a calendar project. That was really cool. But even in PE, we are looking at the sustainability of our community in terms of creating people who are in shape and healthy not just through reading but also by having healthy habits and healthy interests. So getting all the kids swimming and safe in that respect getting kids out hiking and biking and things like that. So kind of building that idea of sustainability and the community into all the areas of study. One that has to probably be mentioned about our school too is the solar panels. This is a huge community partnership now. And because of the work that we do with sustainability and the fact that our students are so often advocating for their own school, we get a lot of attention from business partners. And this is a business partnership through MicroGrid which looks for investors, corporations who can buy the solar panels, depreciate them and then donate them to us after they've depreciated the cost. So it's a really neat program that's allowed us to venture into alternative energy. And this is now a learning opportunity for all the students. They can log in on any day to our solar panel system and they can look at how much energy we're creating or not creating. And in the case of we have a fairly sizable solar grid but it's enough to run our kitchen which is another big learning opportunity. If that's what we need to run our kitchen what are we gonna need to run our whole school or keep living the way that we do? So this would be the last slide from the first half and then if you have questions you guys can come up and the kids or us can answer and then we're gonna talk specifically about the aquaponics program. So we're gonna go to the next slide. Okay. So this is kind of where we're going for the future of our program. Getting the sense not just with the school but with the community that we're in and their business partners and community partners, the sense that the kids are at commons, society is the commons, everything is a shared resource that we all have a responsibility towards. Establishing different lenses through which we can view learning and learners. Pushing, we have a community that is extremely diverse not just racially but also socioeconomically where we have really wealthy families of professional parents and we have very struggling families that are single income or no income at all. So that pushback that we get from poverty and trying to help those kids achieve at the same level as their peers and give them opportunities that their peers have so that they can also be successful members of the community is a really big part of what we're trying to do. So if anyone has any questions right now we'll take a few minutes to answer this. Sure. Did you determine why your top bar bees died? Did you determine why your top bar bees died? Well, we didn't figure out exactly why they died. We think it's probably pesticides because that is one of the leasing causes in death for bees and also they're all dead, like just dead while they're just moving around. There's bodies of bees crawling out of their cells and there's also dead wax malls and dead beetles and dead ants all over the place. When you took on all these projects did you do your own research or did the teachers come and say this is what we're gonna do and teach you how to do it? Well, with a lot of the projects we did they kind of told us what we were gonna do but they put it into our hands in which we had to do most of the work. And like with our, I have to think of an example, with aquaponics like a couple of years ago a group of people went to Sweetwater or not a couple of years ago it was last year but a group of children went to Sweetwater Organics and they, it's a whole thing about aquaponics and so the children brought it back and the principal was interested and so he set up like a seminar and with the seminar we ended up going to just, it progressed from where it was but it's primarily left in the children's hands. Does your solar system have a central hub inverter or is it in phase? Does our solar system have a central inverter? I haven't the foggiest idea. I can actually give you the website for it and we can pull it up and we'll look at what it's doing and then you can get the website for micro grid solar. They're really active in working with schools and making those partnerships and they sell solar systems so their job is to make it simple for schools so that the schools can have it, make it simple for the businesses who wanna do good jobs with the community partners and with schools and help kids and help reduce our dependency on fossil fuels so I'll get you that information out. So a really, really cool program and it makes something affordable that would otherwise be impossible to do on your own. I mean, because the initial cost is so huge. So we'll talk about aquaponics now. As Lauren had mentioned that some of her classmates had gone up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and they were actually working on an entirely different project. They were working on what to do with this brownfield in St. Louis City that had formerly been the Pruitt-Igo housing project and they were involved in this, what do you do with it now project where they were redesigning this 30 acres of what had formerly been a housing project when it was now an urban jungle with second growth trees and just nothing but weeds and rubble and they took this visit to the Sweetwater Organic Place and they came back and decided that that was something that they would like to try here. So we're gonna talk first about what aquaponics is. Is this me? Okay, so one of the things that aquaponics is is a way for students actually to be involved in that food production. Kids, I mean, if you think about it, kids rarely have a choice in what they put into their bodies. The choice is dictated to them by, well, primarily by their mother in their first few years and then sometimes by schools and then sometimes by happenstance or convenience. So like today, for example, when we drive here and our restaurant choices are McDonald's, Taco Bell, we have kind of a forced choice. So this is an opportunity to bring up that question of what is it that we wanna do? How do we wanna do things? So the reason that we kind of decided aquaponics was gonna be a good project for kids is that it would allow them to look at that system. We're not trying to teach kids to be aquaponics. We're giving them an opportunity to do a really in-depth investigation of a food system and the parts of that food system, they're getting an opportunity to investigate the engineering of that system, how the different pieces work together, how to improve efficiency, how to deal with setbacks and problems and these are all really important real-world things and they also have really real-world implications if you mess up, if you make mistakes and we'll probably be talking about some of those things as well. But it also allows students to collaborate in learning with grown-ups. Lauren had mentioned that when they brought it back to the principal, he said, oh, that's a great idea and then that enabled the kids to kind of reach out. We reached out to Lincoln University for collaboration. We reached out to the Missouri Department of Conservation for ideas and understanding how the laws worked. So it's given us a chance to build community partnerships too with the students as equal stakeholders where they're a really important part of this process. I couldn't be standing here talking about this right now if the kids hadn't done all the work that they had done. Okay, Lauren, I think this one's here. Okay, just like the entire system, I like why? Well, like I said earlier, when we had the group of students that went to Sweetwater Organics in Milwaukee, that was the building itself was an abandoned warehouse and with the system of aquaponics, it takes up very little space. And so we used a basement for one of our school buildings that had no purpose at all and we were able to produce quite some food. Like a lot of lettuce was our most successful crop and we went with a seminar after our principal had reached out to the people and figured it out and the people who went through the seminar were able to come back and help with it. And it's part of, I'm trying to think of what to say. Well, since the Sweetwater Organics had opened the system for us, we kind of, we had the eye of what we wanted to do and we built the system and we have the fish and it helps us for, we like the idea of the food production in the smaller spaces and it helped us come with the idea that we could make possibly a new way to grow our own food for our school and help provide for our lunches. So our school district, like they said, has a major impact on our community now and we like to take what we were talking about or like we like to take what we're learning in schools further and so with the fact that we're going to more sustainability we hope it will rub off into our area and originally we just had, we didn't really know where we were going with it and we just took it, how it was coming and we just, we wanted to get somewhere with it and I feel like we did, so. So I talked about the metaphors and this is kind of background and how this then relates back to when we said, when I was talking about school reform and the way that we wanted students to start thinking about themselves and how we wanted the community to start thinking about students. So we have four cornerstones, one is stewardship and you kind of see that, well the kids right in front of me are stewards who work every day in maintaining the condition of tanks, feeding fish, taking care of fish, harvesting lettuce and providing it to the kitchen for them to cook or serve in the salad line. But in other fields too like citizenship. So Lauren had briefly mentioned about providing food for a growing planet. This is one of the things that students are really interested in and we all are as the planet is approaching more, well nine billion people by, yeah, 2050. That's a lot more mouths to feed and all of them need protein. So part of the job of the students is going to be when they're out of school is to figure out how to fill that protein gap. So that was one of the citizenship connections. But leadership, students are really interested in providing the things that they've learned to other people, providing the food that they've produced to other people and there's nothing more satisfying to them than being able to provide a meal to somebody else, a meal that they've taken part in growing. And then finally scholarship. I love this because they collect so much data in this. They have temperature probes and pH probes and they measure the oxygen content of the water. They measure the fish and we find the average and we're really only getting started and using it in terms of scholarship. But it's gonna be a really great part of science class and math class too and my math teachers oftentimes complain that they have a hard time making math connections to the real world and that's because they need the data first. So we're doing a really great job of collecting data and so we'll talk about that in a sec. Jamie, I think you're gonna talk about how this actually works. So I'm going to talk about the actual aquaponics systems and so water, well, it all starts with water. It's aqua water. The entire thing is pretty much based off water and so we have a big fish tank filled with fish and the water from the fish tank, well, the nutrients from the fish tank that the fish create goes and goes into the grow bed which help feed the plants and the lettuce and they grow and it also goes into the bio filter and they're a little bacteria in the water and we just have this plastic stuff with lots of surface area with just anything that bacteria can grow on so that goes in the bio filter and it's already in the water, the bacteria is and we're just giving it a place to live so they can eat the nutrients and thrive off of that and what returns back to the fish tank is cleaner water than what they produced, what came out of the fish tank and we also, there's fish and then there's the plants that were growing and we need to input water and take out water and just, it's a system it all kind of makes itself work better and then the spawning tank which is right there we can also breed our own fish so we were just doing with bluegill before but we can also take reddier and breed them with bluegill and make purple ear and they will grow faster and bigger than the regular bluegill fish and that also has it's own little system without a grow bed, okay? When we talked to other teachers in other schools they wanna know, well how did you do this and this wasn't an overnight thing and we loop with our kids and our kids are really involved and that's a great thing cause it would be really hard if we didn't have that trust in that relationship between students, parents, teachers and community but we still have to build up the interest cause initially a few kids know what it is but most of them don't so our principal had a special workshop and kids got invited to it and it was really interesting cause they got out of class and they didn't all especially know why or what they were gonna do and he had gotten some grant money to build little mini aquaponics tanks and so each tank had two little feeder fish and in the top of the tank it had a little tray that the pump could recirculate water through the tray of gravel and they can grow little radish seeds or sprouts in there and it would recirculate back then down to the tank so that was the initial capacity builder and you can see some kids on stage here doing that we did it in the theater and made it a big production he actually had some speakers come in that some of the students had found on the internet and communicated with via email they volunteered to come in and talk to the students initially just kind of get them excited about it and get them understanding what it was they were gonna be doing and how this is, well, Lauren said we were in the, you said we were in the basement right? Yeah, all of our facilities right now are in a basement we're kind of crunch for space and we use every square inch of building space that we have in our old facilities so the pictures are kind of dark but you can see what they're doing they're collecting data on nitrogen there, pH she's measuring with the probe dissolved oxygen, right? And I think what she's actually doing is finding out that my chemicals and the dissolved oxygen kit were bad and weren't accurate anymore and then we checked and they had expired so that was a good finding for me because I had been using them all summer so, you know the next one, okay? And this is what the students are all responsible for they are responsible for most of the ongoing maintenance and upkeep of the facilities so we've only been underway for about nine months so in terms of like long term what this is gonna look like and how it's gonna work I can't speak to that exactly yet but the students are going every day and collecting data when they do go to collect that data they have a set list of things that they're maintaining they're maintaining the water level they're measuring fish growth they are wiping surfaces down to prevent mold because they're on the basement they're managing the grow bed for aphids and other pest species that can get in there really easily and they're also giving tours they're also talking to community people who wanna come down and see what's going on and how that's working and that's a really great opportunity for stewardship, leadership and citizenship right there. Okay, one of the nice things about this is that I said it's a real world 21st century thing these are some of the things that we've had to adapt to growing out of space in the 21st century we don't get any more planet we don't get any more school room usually we don't get any more space in our community so we're gonna have to think differently about the way that we use it so this is an opportunity to change our mental model about how food is produced or how learning occurs or how buildings are used accidents and learning I love as a science teacher accidents but just like we talked about with the B episode when the top bar hive went dead the question is why and if you think about the concept of going through that process and brainstorming possible causes and then investigating those hypotheses that you have it's a real world science project and it's something that you would actually do in real life it's not something made up where we already know the outcome I have no idea what happened to the top bar hive I have no idea sometimes when the dissolved oxygen in the tank goes down and it's up to the students actually to do that investigation and find out what went on we aren't ahead of the curve but writing it I mean there's lots of people out there doing aquaponics and aquaculture and they do it a lot better than we can do it in our facilities but our purpose isn't that our purpose is to make those connections and provide those opportunities and kind of let kids in on the secret that even if we were just doing it it would be doing just about as well they know as much as we do about aquaponics at our school there's not an adult secret that we're gonna let them in on they're all in on it with us everything that's going on in our going on in our world is going on for them too and they're the ones that are kind of growing into it and they're getting used to it and they're gonna be addressing those challenges Will I think you're gonna talk about so the next piece is how do we afford to do this as a school so Will's gonna talk about that so when we first started aquaponics the whole startup cost about $5,000 half of it was from a grant but the other half we were funded by Sarah and Gateway Greening so yeah because we started off at $5,000 and to this day we haven't gone over six that we haven't reached $6,000 yet so it's on average about $800 a year and so it's not exactly that expensive depending on how big you want the whole system to be if you the bluegills that we have in our tanks cost somewhere around 10 cents and we started experimenting with different plants to see what plants would work the best when we're using the grow bed and out of all the plants we got the lettuce was the most effective so the lettuce cost about somewhere around $1.75 to $2 each packet and honestly all that together I think even though it might be a lot of money it's a good idea because kids it's a good learning kind of opportunity because kids when they're involved in something they're a lot more attentive than if they're just sitting there listening or taking notes in fact there's a quote from Ben Franklin it goes, tell me, I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn so especially if kids were to actually do this experiment and be hands on they could use that they could use that what they've just learned for if they wanna do this system in the future or if they decide to just sort of teach the kids about it or something. All right, so we have a little bit of time left and if you guys have questions either about school reform or our sustainability programs or aquaponics setup system data collection and anything like that I'd be more than willing to let these guys answer those questions and I have a couple of questions up here in case you guys don't have any. You mentioned a non-ocean sourced fish meal what do you feed the fish? Well, originally we were feeding them catfish food but some of the bluegills weren't eating it and so we ended up switching to tilapia food which you, I think we got it from pets where did we get the food? Yeah, from basically any fish feeding store. Another thing I wanted to mention about the feed is that we're working on sort of closing some of those loops so I didn't mention that in our school lunch program we are composting our lunchroom waste and one thing that we found is that we have vermicompost, the actual, the grow bed of our plant has red wiggler worms in there and we also have an outdoor system red wiggler worms and we found over the summer, the hot summer that black soldier fly larva had infested our compost pile. Well black soldier flies have been, larva has been, is being developed as a pet food, a chicken food and a food for bluegill. So we're gonna be experimenting with that, I have tried feeding into them, they ate it. So, but we're gonna be working on that a little bit more on seeing if we can actually raise some of our own food for the fish out of our cafeteria waste. So I'm kind of new at Tizagua Plonics myself but on the lettuce that you grow in the grow bed is it in the basement and how do you get enough sunlight to make it grow in the basement? Yes, the lettuce is kept in the basement and we use lamps, fluorescent lamps to grow them and we're getting LED lamps that will be much better, they'll have more light, it'll grow them faster and it works just fine, the lamps they produce it is like sunlight to them, I mean it's light and they can grow and they get everything that they need out of the other nutrients of the fish tank. Have you done a cost analysis of how much it cost bottom line to produce one pound of fish? Yeah, we were talking about this actually on the way up from St. Louis and we haven't produced a single pound and we're okay with that and because we're not relying on this to be producers, we're relying on this to learn about producers and we would really like to produce but if we have a failure and that was my second question there, system failures are good lessons and sometimes it's the best crafted lesson but we don't wanna have system failures and we don't wanna lose fish and we don't wanna afeit infestations but it's okay for us because instead of buying textbooks we put our money into equipment or we get grants to fund opportunities like this and so for us it would just be really awesome to have a tilapia or a bluegill meal one day in the cafeteria so in terms of cost analysis we're probably doing it really wrong. One of the things that we would like to long term do is have for example the grow tanks in a greenhouse where they could be the reservoir for heat that provides heat to the greenhouse in the wintertime but then also can use natural light in the grow beds from the sun instead of LED lights but like I said before we're kinda restricted by space and what we really wanna do is make those opportunities for students so. And it gets, it starts to cost less the longer you have it because the system will grow and get bigger and you'll have more fish producing more fish so the longer you have it the better it is for cost efficiency. One other thing I wanted to mention about cost efficiency is several of the people that I've talked to who have aquaponics systems or have been working with aquaponics is that it's actually more cost effective for the plants like they're actually getting more value from selling their plants that they grow than from the fish just because the plants grow so fast and so well with all that nutrient from the fish waste. My question is how did you discover that the lettuces were the best to grow in that type of a system versus like tomatoes or cucumbers or other types of vegetables? Well, we didn't really use as many plants to start off with we just kind of grabbed a handful of plants we thought might be effective and we sectioned off the grow bed and just planted them in each section and see which one grew A fastest B which ones grew the healthiest and see which ones which ones would be more of a long term kind of plant than a short term so. And we're going to try other plants we just haven't yet because we've had this system for less than a year. Well, I'd like to thank everybody for coming today and thank you very much for being a good audience for us and our students and if you have any questions later on just find us we'll be hanging around for a while. Thank you very much.