Arlington’s Annie Sobolewski discusses how and why she joined the boys swimming team and what the experience has been like. Stephen Haynes, Poughkeepsie Journal
A year-long effort to study, engineer, construct and operate an aquaponics lab at Arlington High School has resulted in a $30,000 grand prize for six students there.
The students — seniors Jacob Gaines, Krishna Koka, Spencer Koonin, Shannon Gibson, Emme Magliato and Tyler Locke — are members of the high school’s science research team, AquaPals. They are the grand prize winners in Scholastic’s Lexus Eco Challenge, a national STEM competition for students in grades 6-12 that empowers them to better the environment in their communities as well as globally. That award comes on top of $10,000 they won in the first round of the competition last year.
Magliato said the team is already training the next generation of AquaPals at the school.
“In the past year, we have spread sustainable farming to those near and far, and could not be happier about the experiences we have shared,” she said.
Because the Hudson River is part of their local environment, the team took on the mission of raising fish that are free from contaminates, such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). Aided by their teacher advisers, Maribel Pregnall and Tricia Muraco, the students created an aquaponics system as a model to show how uncontaminated food can be produced sustainably.
General Electric Co. manufacturing facilities dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs from capacitor manufacturing plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls into the river during a 30-year span before the practice was banned in the late 1970s, according to Journal reports. More than two-thirds of the PCBs, an oily fire retardant and insulator that is a cancer-causing chemical, remain in the Hudson despite a cleanup effort that dates to 2002. Because of the pollution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said that decades must pass before Hudson River fish can safely be eaten on a regular basis.
“The Lexus Eco Challenge offered these six exceptional students the opportunity to learn that science is interconnected with our everyday lives,” Muraco said. “These teenagers worked daily with our high school aquaponics system, but their project extended to the greater school community, the Hudson Valley and worldwide. The AquaPals took what they learned and made political, societal and educational impacts.”
For the AquaPals’s final challenge, the students focused on the issues PCB contamination causes, not only locally but throughout the world.
The team built five aquaponics systems throughout the Hudson Valley: two small-scale systems at Vail Farm Elementary School and West Road Elementary School designed for classroom demonstrations; two large-scale systems designed for educational purposes and food production; and one at Arlington High.
“One of these DIY systems is at Poughkeepsie High School and is being integrated into the Next Gen science standards where they are growing tilapia and various crops,” Magliato said. “The other is at a farm in Gardiner. This system provides a source of brown trout and vegetables for the family to enjoy year-round in a sustainable manner. The last system is (our) very own system at Arlington High School, which serves as an educational tool for teaching the community, as well as a major food producer.”
Globally, the team tailored aqua-care packages that included seeds, water chemistry testing kits, greenhouse thermometers, fish food and their 35-page aquaponics manual, to farmers in Kenya, Morocco and Indonesia.
“One of the people that we collaborate with in Indonesia asks us for advice almost daily and he just harvested lettuce for the first time,” Magliato said.
The prize money will be divided among the school, the teacher advisers and the students. There’s also a 2019 Lexus the advisers will share for the summer, which will be used “to enjoy team day trips this summer,” Magliato said.
For the AquaPals, the experience has been inspirational.
“Winning the challenge is an added bonus, but the real honor comes in the work that we have done to give back to our community,” said Magliato, who will be attending Yale University to study molecular, cellular and developmental biology, as well as global and public health. “We started this project over a year ago with the sheer intentions of learning and growing as scientists and students. Flash forward to today and we won a national science competition.”
Visit www.scholastic.com/lexus for more information.
Read or Share this story: https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/2019/05/10/arlington-high-schools-aquapals-science-team-wins-national-contest/1146030001/