St. Mary’s Students Grow Oysters, Win National Skills Recognition

A group of St. Mary’s County high schoolers took fifth place at the SkillsUSA National Championships this month for a project that pairs low-cost water-monitoring technology they helped build with an unlikely classroom experiment: keeping oysters alive and growing in a 500-gallon tank.

Students at the Dr. James A. Forrest Career and Technology Center in Leonardtown competed in the Career Pathways: Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources category at the SkillsUSA National Leadership and Skills Conference, held June 1-5 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Their project, “Saving Our Waters with Oysters,” built on four years of work developing the Bay Observation Box, or BOB — an automated water-quality monitor students designed with the St. Mary’s River Watershed Association to fill gaps in Chesapeake Bay monitoring data.

The BOB project began in 2022 as a partnership between SMRWA volunteers, notably Norm and Shelly O’Foran, and Natural Resource Management students under teacher Dorothy Birch. Using makerspace components, students and volunteers have built 22 of the devices at a cost of about $1,100 each — a fraction of the more than $20,000, and sometimes upward of $60,000, that comparable commercial monitoring systems can cost. The buoys, deployed at various points from the St. Mary’s River to St. Clement’s Bay and Breton Bay, transmit water temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, pH and electrical conductivity readings roughly every 15 minutes, and the project has since expanded to involve students from the school’s engineering, graphic communications and IT networking programs.

Two years ago, NRM students Ryder Pobst, Megan Shepherd and Anna Biggs extended the project into oyster restoration, placing 17 oysters in the school’s aquaculture tank and keeping them alive for months on an algae diet, using BOB data to fine-tune water conditions — a result SMRWA Executive Director Emma Green Ewing said defied her expectations. “It’s not easy to grow oysters in tanks that do not have a continuous supply of Bay water flowing through them,” she said. That work earned the students a silver medal at the 2025 SkillsUSA Maryland State Championship.

This past school year, Pobst continued the project alongside students Armirah Gonzales and Abigail Aina, with Shepherd volunteering support after her graduation. The team placed more than 2,000 oyster spat into two tanks — one built to mimic a complex Bay ecosystem and another kept at idealized growth conditions — to compare survival rates. Six months later, 1,449 of the spat were still alive, with 11.5% of the idealized-tank spat and 3.1% of the complex-ecosystem spat showing significant growth.

The classroom experiment mirrors a much larger challenge facing the Chesapeake Bay. Regional scientists estimate that native oyster populations in the bay have fallen to somewhere between 1% and 3% of their historic levels, the result of overharvesting, disease and habitat loss dating back more than a century. Federal, state and nonprofit partners including NOAA and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources have spent years restoring reef habitat across the bay’s tributaries, an effort that reached a milestone in 2025 when partners completed work on more than 1,900 acres of reef across 10 targeted waterways in Maryland and Virginia.

Natural Resources Management teacher Dorothy Birch said the annual project keeps giving students real problems to solve. “Every year, this project dramatically enhances student learning by giving students real-world problems to solve in an investigation that engages and excites them,” she said.

The BOB project has also inspired offshoot work. Student Abigail Aina said working on the water monitors pushed her toward her own environmental capstone project: a zero-waste soap and candle product made entirely from invasive English ivy, using a liquid soap poured into a bamboo-mold wax container that can later be melted down and reused as a candle. “I enjoyed learning about how the BOB was made,” Aina said. “It inspired me to make my own products that are environmentally sustainable and helpful.”

The project has been funded through four Chesapeake Bay Trust Youth Environmental Education grants and three Oyster Innovation Award grants from the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance and Chesapeake Bay Foundation, funding that has allowed the partnership to grow from a handful of prototype buoys in 2022 to the current network of 22 monitors. Green Ewing said the project’s reach now extends well beyond water-quality data collection. “The BOBs project starts with water quality monitoring, but it combines so many aspects of our work, teaching people about our waterways and training the next generation of Chesapeake Bay leaders,” she said.

More information on the BOB project is available at smrwa.org/programs/bobs-project, and donations to SMRWA’s programs can be made at smrwa.org/donate.