LUBEC – It’s Monday morning and Maine’s only high school aquaculture laboratory is humming with activity.

Debra Brown and Sara McConnell are bent over a microscope examining slides of phytoplankton they collected from the town marina.

Peering into the lens and checking what they see against a chart above their heads, the Lubec High School seniors are looking for species of the tiny aquatic plant that are known to be toxic to fish.

“We send our information in to the Department of Marine Resources,” Brown says.

The laboratory is lined with aquariums that students use for projects such as Jonathan Murray’s experiment breeding exotic fish.

In the center of the room, 65 brook trout circle in two 650-gallon tanks.

The fish are a freshman project and have doubled in size since school began this fall, according to instructor Brian Leavitt.

“The kids are managing the water, learning how to feed the fish and identifying problems,” Leavitt said. “We hope to spawn these fish next fall.”

Off to the side, Debbie Jamieson is teaching a botany class. Jamieson’s students are using the waste-laden water from the fish tanks to grow hydroponic vegetables in a 400-square-foot greenhouse attached to the laboratory.

The nutrient-rich water enters the greenhouse through a gravity-feed system and is periodically pumped up onto the growing tables, flooding the roots of the plants.

In the spring, the students sell the fresh lettuce, tomatoes, hot peppers, squash, cabbage and flowers at Lubec’s Red & White grocery store.

Leavitt said students designed and built the greenhouse, which is kept at 65 degrees year round. The facility includes an algae culturing center, where students grow algae for a variety of shellfish projects.

On one wall is a closed-loop cascade system designed by junior Ian Campbell. Water, enriched with Miracle-Gro fertilizer, flows through PVC piping, which is outfitted with openings for tiny lettuce plants.

If there’s not a big difference between the growth rate of the Miracle-Gro plants and the fish-waste plants, it would make sense to use the wastewater from the fish tanks, Leavitt said.

“This is all about testing things,” he said. “There’s a lot of problem-solving that goes on here.”

The aquaculture laboratory and an experimental mussel lease site in Cobscook Bay are classrooms for 38 Lubec students this year. Open to vocational and academic students, from freshmen to seniors, the program prepares them for jobs in the aquaculture industry or college programs in environmental studies or marine biology.

Brown, who has participated in the program since her freshman year, said she plans to enter medical school at the University of New England next fall.

Leavitt said many students would go on to work in Maine’s aquaculture industry, which is centered in Lubec and neighboring Eastport.

Lubec fish farmers are raising salmon, scallops, mussels and even halibut, according to guidance counselor Rick Jamieson.

“These are people on the cutting edge, but they aren’t getting any younger,” Jamieson said. “Local people want employees who will stay here, and this program allows these kids that option.”

Now in its fourth year, the Lubec High School aquaculture program is becoming known throughout the country.

Students from as far away as California and Louisiana attended an international conference the Lubec students sponsored at Washington County Technical College in October.

The conference for high school students who work on community-related projects attracted 170 students and teachers from throughout Maine and New Brunswick.

Jamieson, the botany teacher who designed the Lubec program in 1996, said the Washington County Technical College wants to involve the Lubec students in that college’s new aquaculture program. That would allow them to gain college credits while still in high school.

Lubec High School expects to be certified as Maine’s first vocational aquaculture site next fall. That would open the program to students from Jonesport-Beals, Machias and Narraguagus high schools and Washington Academy in East Machias.

Those schools and Lubec High School make up the Coastal Washington County Institute of Technology.

“The program is a perfect fit for this high school,” said SAD 19 Superintendent Scott Porter. “There are a lot of fish farming jobs in Washington County, and the community has bought in to the program.”

The Lubec aquaculture program began in 1996 with a $15,000 Annenberg Rural Challenge grant and $20,000 from the town of Lubec

Since then, the program has taken off, garnering a $30,000 grant from the Libra Foundation in 1999 and gaining increasing support from Lubec taxpayers.

Porter said the town of Lubec has contributed $100,000 to the project over the past two years. The state will reimburse the town for slightly more than 90 percent of that cost, but there is a two-year delay in the state reimbursement, he said.

The money allowed the school to hire Leavitt, who has a degree in aquaculture from Unity College and five years’ experience with Atlantic Salmon of Maine, one of the state’s largest salmon aquaculture programs.

Leavitt said many of the classroom activities are the same as those that people in the aquaculture industry or college classrooms do daily.

While many high schools offer classes in marine science or ecological studies, Lubec High School has the only complete program devoted to aquaculture. Students learn everything from water quality testing to fish health to marketing, he said.

And the program is benefiting from relationships that Leavitt developed during his five years in the aquaculture industry. A Norwegian company donated a software database that the students use to analyze such things as feed conversion rates – how many pounds of feed it takes to produce fish of a certain weight.

The classes allow students to learn by doing, even if that means making mistakes, he said

One of this year’s student projects – comparing the growth rates of Atlantic salmon raised on animal byproduct fish feed to those that ate animal-free food – ended when a water recirculating system failed over a recent weekend, he said.

The 150 landlocked Atlantic salmon donated by an Enfield hatchery died from lack of oxygen, Leavitt said.

“But that’s how you learn,” he said.

Leavitt said he hopes to make the program self-sustaining by marketing eggs and sperm from fish raised and spawned in the laboratory and selling the mussels that are growing on the lease site in Cobscook Bay.

Eventually, Leavitt said, he would like to see the program move from its current headquarters behind Lubec Consolidated School – in the school’s former wastewater treatment plant – to a larger facility right on the ocean.

But some things will have to come first, and the program has other needs, including a saltwater chiller and a boat.

Local fishermen now take the students out to the mussel site, he said.

The mussel-growing project, like everything else in the Lubec aquaculture program, was designed by the kids, Leavitt said.

“They wrote the lease application to DMR,” he said.