A group of students at George Mason High School, under the direction of two Mason science teachers Jamie Lahy and Peter Mecca and Falls Church City Public Schools Food Services director Richard Kane, have created an aquaculture and a hydroponic system with the aim of providing food for the school’s lunches.
The students, senior Bikash Shahi, juniors Jacob Brady, Ian Leach, Eric Lowery and Andrew Pishner and sophomore Adrian Kamel, have created a self-filtering aquaculture system to raise tilapia. They will have a trial run with goldfish who will live in the tank of water that’s located in the school and then introduce tilapia into the aquaculture system in August or September 2016, which they will raise of eight months and harvest them for school lunch.
The students also created a hydroponic system, which they planted lettuce in on Thursday, April 21. It will take six weeks for the lettuce plants, of which there are three kinds (oak, summer and butterhead), for consumption in the school’s lunches. The projects were funded through one of the Falls Church Education Foundation’s SuperGrants.
