At Lexington’s Providence Montessori Middle School, the students get their hands dirty. They have a lot to take care of outside the school.
There are several composting piles, a garden, several beehives, and some egg-laying chickens. Next to the garden, the students oversee a hoop house that has more garden plants and two tanks with fish, part of an aquaponics system.
The waste from the fish is collected in a settling chamber, and the students use it to fertilize plants without much soil called hydroponics.
Michael Harr is the teacher overseeing all this. He explained how the hydroponics works.
“It is an enclosed system where there's a reservoir and some sort of growing medium or tank, and water flows through that. And then plants are grown in that system using either the fish waste or the chemical fertilizers being added in. So, it's really great fun, like a science project with the students, where they get to see beginning to end of like growing something from seed, watching it grow in this system every day. And then finally getting harvested.”
Harr and his middle school students want to produce enough produce, eggs, and honey to sell to local restaurants and businesses.
“So, a big part of the Montessori curriculum is micro-economy or production in exchange. And so, part of that is a garden system that we have gardens, aquaponics, hydroponics, all of that, where we will produce goods then we, right now sell to parents in the car line. We also use it to produce baked goods that we sell, but working towards having business partners in Lexington, real restaurants to sell to is one of our medium-term goals.”
Last Christmas a conversation between one of Harr’s students and her uncle led to a partnership with Coles 735 Main in Lexington.
13-year-old Julia Cauthen talked to Chef Cole Arimes about using his restaurant’s food waste for composting and feed for the chickens. He liked the idea after touring the school and talking to Harr’s students.
“We started talking about fermenting, and composting, and just all the different ways to utilize you know, all those good vegetables, especially the local ones that come in. And I got an invite to the class. And so, I came and took a tour and didn't realize how much they have going on. I was blown away.”
Arimes estimates Coles produces fifty to sixty pounds of food waste each week. His staff began collecting all the food scraps, and instead of putting it in the dumpster, they filled up a plastic tub.
“It's a good training tool for my staff. So, they can see just exactly how much waste they are generating and get a little more efficient with their cuts, and their knife work. And you know, we're always working on knife skills here. So, it gives them a good visual aid to say, oh, man, I'm wasting more than I should. But it also, you know, just instead of going into the trash can into the landfill, it's going back to the land, which, you know, makes it nice. We save anything from vegetable scraps, we've got eggshells, that go there. Providence has got a lot going on. So, the more they take, the better off we are.”
Each week Harr picks up the tub of food waste and brings it to school where the students pick through it. They fill a bucket full of vegetables to feed their chickens.
I asked Harr, “Have you noticed any difference in the chickens since you started feeding them this kind of stuff versus just like store-bought chicken feed if you know what I mean?”
Harr says, “They absolutely love this stuff. As soon as we give it to them, they go wild, and they'll just eat it all day. I think that they're a lot happier with getting fresh quality food than they would be with getting just regular old feed.”
13-year-old Bailey Collier says, “I didn't know a lot about chickens before I came to the school. I guess I learned a lot about them, their needs. And like all the other creatures that we have. So, like fish have to do with compost. And like in the long run that really surprised me. I didn't know that it would tie into each other so well. But I feel like we have a really good composting system. Like our school, our curriculum is very different from other people. So, this is like all doing all this is like a class for us.”
Arimes’ niece Julia agrees that the restaurant food scraps are important.
“We're really big on sustainability here. So, it was really nice to be able to add to our compost pile and help feed the chickens, too.”
Their teacher sees a lot of benefits beyond the school.
“Oh, it's awesome. It's what keeps me going, is watching the students realize, you know, this is meaningful work that I can actually do here. I can produce something; I can grow something and then it's going to actually go and impact somebody else's life.”
Harr says the students decide what to do with the money they make from selling the produce and other items.
“We just use a micro economy fund, right? It's just a bank account that the students have semi-control of, we as the adults still have to have our names on everything. But they make community decisions about what to do with those funds. So, a student will bring an idea or a concern to everyone and say, this is something that I want to do, this is how much it will cost, and the community will vote on it and say this is something that we want to spend that money on or not, as well as all the maintenance types of things. We have chickens, they have to get fed. So, we have to buy that food. We have to buy the fish food that feeds the fish in the aquaponics system. So, it's that maintenance type stuff, but then also bigger projects that they get to decide on.”
Arimes calls the relationship with the Providence Montessori students a win-win. “I love it. It's a really good example of just how a simple conversation can turn into some proactive you know, actions.”
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