By Angelo Piersanti

During the 2024–2025 school year, Zac Ladd, Shelton Assistant Head of Upper School, and Tripp Givens, Shelton Upper School Engineering and Film Faculty, launched Shelton’s inaugural semester-long Urban Homesteading course for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The program aims to foster deeper connections between students and the natural world by offering opportunities for year-round engagement, including animal and plant care, seasonal tasks, and leadership roles for older students.

Mr. Ladd says there’s value in students stepping away from technology and engaging in real-world, hands-on learning. “In a time when so much of this generation’s life is spent on screens, I think it’s important to do something hands-on,” he says. “Learning how to care for animals or build something like a chicken coop is incredibly valuable and practical. These are skills students can carry with them for a long time.”

The Shelton Urban Homesteading class centers around project-based learning. Over the spring semester, students focused on learning routines for maintaining Shelton’s beehives. They also worked to establish a chicken coop and vegetable garden. These projects involved designing and building the coop and raised garden beds, as well as selecting chicken breeds and plant varieties. Numerous tasks had to be completed as part of these objectives.

Students identified an appropriate site on campus that would meet the basic needs of the chickens. Along the way, they learned valuable practical life skills such as measuring, cutting, and fastening building materials, as well as how to prepare the soil and operate various power tools. 

Shelton senior Lydia Stroh says the hands-on nature of the Urban Homesteading class makes learning more meaningful and memorable. “It’s very interactive, and I feel like you learn more by doing,” she says. “With outdoor education, you learn by trying — like taking care of animals — and that kind of trial-and-error approach helps it stick.”

While working on the chicken coop and garden projects, students began to express interest in developing an aquaponics system. This initiative was driven by students’ desire to create a sustainable, closed-loop system that would eventually feed and water plants in specialized beds by periodically flooding them with nutrient-rich water from an attached fish tank. Extensive research and experimentation with tubing, water conditioning, pumps, and siphons shaped the planning of the system.

A curiosity for how things work — and how to fix them when they don’t — led students to explore plumbing valves and the possibility of 3D printing them. They are currently testing a small-scale version of the system using goldfish and a standard fish tank. Eventually, the system could be scaled to produce both fish and plants for human consumption.

All of these challenges test the students’ abilities to acquire new knowledge and skills, and the Urban Homesteading program seamlessly integrates concepts across engineering, science, and math to develop solutions. Ladd particularly enjoys watching his students come up with ideas, adapt their prior knowledge to the problems at hand, and innovate in new directions.

The program's success relies on the instructors following the students' interests and questions —students drive the learning process. This flexible strategy encourages students to take ownership of their learning and embrace the rituals of trial and error as an essential part of it.

As the Urban Homesteading program grows and evolves, it promises to provide Shelton students with a unique and enriching educational experience. Ladd now envisions Urban Homesteading as the cornerstone of an expansive Outdoor Education program, spanning Pre-K through 12th grade and anchoring the school’s long-term vision for sustainability.

Thank you to the Shelton Parents' Association and Shelton parents for supporting this and other Shelton programs.