Kids in Fairfax County schools are getting a hands-on education in the environment by raising trout in the classroom.
MaryAnn Settlemyre, the STEAM and outdoor education specialist at Centerville Elementary School, says her school has been raising trout for 12 to 14 years: The teacher who started it, Josh Douds, is now the principal.
Classes get trout eggs from the statewide Trout in the Classroom project around the beginning of the school year, and raise them until about April, releasing the fish into the area waters that the program tells them most need to be repopulated. This year, it will be in Fauquier County.
Settlemyre took over the program about 10 years ago, and it’s grown to four or five tanks in a typical year.
Among the things kids learn through the program is “to appreciate, enjoy, and understand our environment and what we can do to support it,” Settlemyre says.
Kids don’t necessarily get a whole lot of face time with the environment in Fairfax County. “We want to say to children, ‘Protect the environment,’ that ‘You’re the future.’ They have no idea what ‘the environment’ means,” Settlemyre says, adding that kids at her school have 34 different first languages. “Many children are brand-new to our country, some who’ve never been outside of suburbia except what we do.”
The program lets kids connect with the natural world, she says: “They know they’re caring for the environment. They know why they’re doing it. They educate their peers on a regular basis, simply just by talking about it.”
‘Let Them Go’
Settlemyre says her job in this program, and in general, is to be a facilitator. “I believe your job is to give them the skills they need and then let them go and fly with it. Support them where they need support, remediate where that needs to happen. But it’s their job to be in charge of their learning.”
She says that in the day-to-day of the trout program, “I do nothing. It is not my job to take care of the tanks. We have teams of sixth-graders who are responsible to check the water every single day. If there are unviable eggs or fish that have died, it’s their responsibility to get them out. They clean the filters; they check the pH.”
Settlemyre said a problem in one of the tanks required a quick transfer of fish, cleaning of the tank and research to figure out the problem. “They emptied the tank; they scrubbed the tank — I mean, these are things most kids would complain about.”
She emphasizes that these fish aren’t pets: There’s no counting or naming of the fish. There are too many; they move too fast; they have to be released in April, and some die before that.
The work the kids put in gives them a sense of pride, Settlemyre says. “I can’t even tell you how proud they are of their tanks. … And they’re being scientists, doing STEAM and [performing] all those 21st-century skills that we want in our children, through a fish tank.”
Support All Around
Centerville High School also runs a trout tank, Settlemyre says, and release day is “this multigenerational day” where the high schoolers create lab environmental lessons for the elementary school kids students to participate in.
Centreville Elementary is a Green Ribbon school, and Settlemyre says she gets plenty of support from fellow sixth-grade teacher Terry Gray, Douds, and the staff and parents. She said the school has a 75-member Green Team of kids who are out in the school yard at 8:15 a.m. every Thursday working on projects, and that the fifth-graders are already buzzing about who gets to be on the trout team next year.
Settlemyre loves to talk about one of her sixth-graders, a quiet young man named Ethan. “He comes down every day, without fail, both at lunchtime and at the end of the day, to see what needs to be done with the fish tank.” He tests the water, researches beneficial plants and more.
“This is a student that finds school difficult,” Settlemyre says. “Yet, he’s doing all sorts of higher-level reasoning, all sorts of higher-level math. He just needed the right niche. That’s what that’s one of the reasons I do what I do. Because the kids who seem to find the environment aren’t always your best students in school. There are kids looking for their place and they find it in the outdoors.”
Featured image courtesy Fairfax County Public Schools
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