Students Are Up to Something Fishy

Students at five Eastside elementary schools are breeding fish to fill the MacArthur Park and Hollenbeck Park lakes.

Their first batch of bluegill and mosquito-eating fish ( gambusia affinis ) will be released within the next month at Hollenbeck, said Steve Brye, project manager for the central area team of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

The office staff of 10 raised $500 from informal coffee gatherings to buy the aquariums, pumps and fish for the five schools--Soto Street, Second Street, Sheridan Street, St. Mary’s and Glassell Park--after it was turned down for a government grant to start the project.

“We were heartbroken that we didn’t get it because we really felt it deserved (the funding),” Brye said, adding that he hopes to raise more money to expand the program to other schools in the Eastside and in South-Central.

At Soto Street, students from teacher Mary Lou Mares’ fourth-grade class pointed out four new fish that have spawned in the two weeks since the aquarium was installed in the library.

The students have also watched the growth of tadpoles, one of which died, Mares said. Three of her students said they had never seen an aquarium before.

“Looking back, my kindergarten class had a goldfish, but this will really teach the students about the environment and ecological resources and let them feel that that’s their lake,” Brye said.

The lake at MacArthur Park has been drained during construction of the Metro Red Line station there; Hollenbeck Park lake was drained for regular maintenance. The first batch of fish will go into Hollenbeck, and the school aquariums will be replenished in time to release fish at MacArthur Park when its lake is refilled in August.

In the same vein, Brye started a seedling project two years ago at Ninth Street Elementary School to grow trees to be planted near freeways and at Metro subway stations. Again, his office staff raised the money through coffee meetings to build a chain-link cage and buy the seedlings.

He also received a $35,000 state grant that will allow the seedling project to be expanded to Glassell Park and Soto Street elementary schools on the Eastside, Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Compton and George Washington Carver Elementary School in South-Central. Construction of the cages there is under way. Those four schools will tend 3,000 seedlings altogether, he said.

“We’re not looking to replace the commercial nursery trees that go to these areas, but we think it’s a good idea that a good percentage of the trees be planted by the children themselves,” Brye said. “We want to empower the children so they know that the problems and solutions are in their hands, that they can be powerful.”