DATE: Sunday, November 9, 1997              TAG: 9711070300

SECTION: SUFFOLK SUN             PAGE: 22   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PHYLLIS SPEIDELL, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

STUDENTS DESIGN, CONSTRUCT SELF-SUSTAINING POND IT WILL SERVE DECORATIVE AND EDUCATION PURPOSES FOR LAKELAND HIGH SCIENCE STUDENTS.

To one educational grant from Virginia Power add 3,500 gallons of water, countless tons of dirt and rock, seven coy and a dozen enthusiastic high school students and what you have created will be a valuable teaching tool that is also a scenic addition to Lakeland High School's landscaping.

The advanced placement environmental science class at Lakeland, under the leadership of teacher James ``Wes'' Moreland, recently constructed a large pond in an enclosed courtyard at the school.

The two level pond, with a waterfall and filtration system, was designed by students to be ecologically balanced and, ultimately, self sustaining.

The pond project incorporated practical lessons from biology, earth science, math, and environmental science classes into the planning, and then the manual labor to construct it.

Earlier in the school year Moreland's students designed the pond and then selected - after studying growing and feeding seasons - the plants and animals that would best sustain the pond's ecosystem.

``There is a lot going on in a pond, more than you would think,'' Jesse White, a senior, said. ``We learned a lot about soil, nitrogen cycles, carbon cycles and ecological balance.''

The pond is planted with water hyacinths and stocked with coy, also known as Japanese carp.

``Right now the coy, our main species in the pond, are an indicator of the pond's health,'' Ian Plude, a senior, said.

``We are working toward adding more plants and animals, crawfish, snails, and frogs, for the fish to feed on.''

Even with carefully drawn plans pond construction was not always easy.

``It took us almost two months of digging, but that was the most fun part anyway,'' Katherine Kalwhite, a senior, said.

Joshua Jones, flailing away with pickax one afternoon when the digging first started, struck concrete.

Thinking it was just construction debris from when the school was built eight years ago Joshua kept digging until he realized that he was chipping a hole in a drain pipe no one had expected to find.

Once the pipe was repaired and the excavation completed, a liner of NASA-developed, hi-tech plastic was laid to form a 13-foot-by-9-foot pool with graduated depths of 1 to 3 feet to accommodate different types of aquatic plants.

A perimeter of granite rocks around the main pool was part of the original plan.

Moreland had considered a field trip to the western part of the state to collect rocks - until he discovered that rock gathering there is illegal.

Vulcan Materials Company in Suffolk came to the rescue with a donation of 5,500 pounds of granite.

Although the pond is designed to require little maintenance over the winter, the class will be periodically testing water quality and biodiversity, the number and kinds of organisms living in the pool.

``This is an experiment in pond life that will provide students an ecosystem that will allow them to interact with a growing habitat,'' Moreland said.

Moreland has applied for an additional grant for equipment to enable the students to also test the pond for acid rain effects and to do more sophisticated water and soil quality testing.

The $1,000 grant that funded the pond was part of a Virginia Power Partnership program that gave $75.000 in grants to 40 schools in Virginia and parts of North Carolina for the development of new educational programs fostering math and science.

Locally, Windsor Elementary School was also awarded a grant for scientific instruments. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by MICHAEL KESTNER

Lakeland High environmental science teacher Wes Moreland provided

the direction for the pond project at Lakeland High.

Katie Kalwhite, above, was among the students in an environmental

science class at Lakeland who provided the muscle for digging and

construction of a self-supporting pond, left, built in an enclosed

courtyard at Lakeland High.

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