JAY — An after-school project has students learning many lessons.

Teacher Rob Taylor stood on a ladder to drill a hole in a panel of a geodesic dome greenhouse on Tuesday. He and several students were installing a small, solar panel.

Jay Middle School student Bryan Riley assisted him from the ground while other students watched, waiting to go inside the dome to warm up.

The lesson for the afternoon was learning how to wire the 5-watt solar panel to run the 4.5-watt fan to ventilate the greenhouse.

The output of the panel is about one-twelfth of the energy it takes to light an average light bulb, student Mason Shink said.

The panel was being put on the south side of the dome so that if the sun is shining, the light would hit it most of the time, he said.

It should have enough power to run the fan all the time, Jordy Daigle, another student, said.

They had already prepared the wires marking them positive and negative.

“The white wire is positive and the black wire is negative,” fifth-grader Lauren Cornelio said.

The afternoon session was part of the Tiger After School Program, Taylor said. Any kids who want to participate can just show up, he said. Other students are also involved and where one group stops, the other takes over.

“So far whatever needs to be done is what we do,” Taylor said.

Inside the dome, students gathered around Taylor as he talked about the next step in wiring. Students had built a raised bed for plantings out of landscape pavers and other materials. The pavers were neatly stacked in rows about 2 to 3 feet high around three-quarters of the interior of the dome.

A black plastic tank contained 1,400 gallons of water. Students monitor heat, air and soil temperature using probes they installed. The results show up on a laptop computer set up in Taylor’s classroom.

Very early Tuesday morning, the temperature outside was 17 degrees Fahrenheit, Riley said. Inside the dome it was about 40 degrees, the water in the water tank was about 50 degrees and soil was 43 degrees, he said.

“We’re almost finished building it,” student Austin Gilboe said of the greenhouse.

A lead group of eighth-graders and a couple of seventh-graders in honors algebra and geometry worked during the last school year to design the dome. They brought together students and community members and other volunteers in June to put it up. Grants and donations have funded much of the project. The plan is to use it to grow vegetables and flowers and learn how to sustain a garden.

“It’s cool. It’s fun. It’s really educational and we work on it a lot in service learning academy,” Nate Goodine, another student, said.

So far, cucumbers, tomatoes, leeks and parsley have been planted. The produce will go to the cafeteria staff to use in meals served at school.

Two weeks ago, they installed insulation under the rocks and soil under the perimeter of the dome walls.

A lot of people thought it would be fine with just dirt, student Trevor Doiron said, but that’s not true.

If there wasn’t any foam on the bottom, frost would build up and kill the plants, fourth-grader Noah Gilbert said.

Students in Carol Hardy’s after-school reading club have started a compost project inside barrels in the dome, Taylor said. They use cafeteria scraps among other materials.

Much has been done since last spring, he said. Students have done masonry work and installed an under-soil ventilation system. They’ve also poured concrete for the under-the-door pad and lugged buckets of a 50-50 mixture of soil and compost inside for the planting soil.

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