A classroom oasis: Houston high school students learn about agriculture, food security and climate change in a controlled environment

Students in the Agritecture program at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston harvest greens that they grew at the school. 

Photo’s provided by Booker T. Washington High School

Students who attend Houston’s Booker T. Washington High School live in a food desert. That means their families don’t have easy access to fresh, nutritious and affordable food.

The high school’s agriculture teacher, Surendra Surujdeo-Maharaj, Ph.D., came up with a way to address this food insecurity as well as climate change: He taught these students to grow their own food indoors.

Surujdeo-Maharaj — known to his students as Dr. Maha — leads a project called “Agritecture: Exposing K-12 Students to an Innovative Approach to Climate Change and Food Security through Experiential Learning.” Desmond Mortley, Ph.D., a research professor of plant and soil science at Tuskegee University, is the co-principal investigator on this project, which is funded by the MEA Center at N.C. A&T’s College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.

Maharaj turned his classroom into an oasis in a food desert. (The term “agritecture” is a mash-up of the words “agriculture” and “architecture” and suggests indoor growing, whether it’s in a greenhouse or some other interior space.) His students used hydroponics, aeroponics and plain old dirt in trays to grow plants along the edge of the classroom.

“I didn’t want this to be a lot of theory about greenhouses,” he said. “I wanted the classroom to be the greenhouse.”

His students worked outside, too. They tended a raised-bed community garden, planted a pollinator garden, where milkweed attracted monarch butterflies, and installed a rain garden to reduce runoff from heavy storms.

Greens grown by students in the Agritecture program at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston are shown in the agriculture classroom of Surendra Surujdeo-Maharaj, Ph.D. Much of the produce was grown on the shelves that line the edge of the classroom.

Through both indoor and outdoor gardening, students learned the fundamentals of agriculture — how to grow and nurture seeds, how much light and water plants need, how to ward off diseases.

Students grew leafy greens — chard, arugula, collards and two types of lettuce — plus microgreens, cherry tomatoes, bok choy, okra and jalapeño peppers. After harvest, his students learned how to triple-wash and dry the produce, package the fresh greens in plastic clamshells and design and create labels. Students then handed out these ready-to-eat salads to their classmates in the hallways and the cafeteria.

During the 2021-22 school year, 103 students took part in Agritecture. They produced more than 800 clamshells worth of salads — roughly 45 to 50 per week throughout the school year.

Maharaj said indoor growing provided an essential environmental lesson. Indoor plants need significantly less water. There is no need to apply pesticides. And the harvested crops traveled exactly zero carbon miles to where they are eaten. The food was of high quality, too. In a blind taste test, the Houston Independent School District’s chief executive chef found no difference between the leafy greens grown outside and the ones raised in Dr. Maha’s classroom.

Perhaps most importantly of all, the indoor crops kept growing all year, which meant students didn’t have to contend with the weather outside.

“I think that’s huge, particularly in food deserts — knowing that you can have a continuous supply of food regardless of what the climate is,” he said. “That’s what the essence of solving food insecurity looks like.”