Walk into a participating classroom in Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Los Alamos, or Pecos this fall and you will hear the same quiet sound: the low hum of a chiller pump keeping fifty-five gallons of water at cutthroat temperature. Inside the tank, a few hundred eggs the size of a match head are turning slowly into fish. Around it, ten or twenty or thirty students are learning to be watershed scientists. This is Trout in the Classroom, and in northern New Mexico it now reaches sixteen schools.
Trout in the Classroom is a hands-on conservation education program that Trout Unlimited has run in schools for more than thirty years, in roughly thirty-five states, with over one hundred twenty thousand students taking part in a typical year. Students raise trout from egg to fingerling in the classroom, learn the science that keeps the fish alive, and release their fish into an approved stream at the end of the school year. It is one of the most durable science-and-stewardship programs in American education, and the Truchas Chapter of Trout Unlimited runs a growing edition of it right here in northern New Mexico.
The 2025 to 2026 season in numbers
Our chapter closed the 2025 to 2026 season with sixteen participating classrooms, up from thirteen the year before. The program is coordinated by Michael J. Jozwiakowski, Ph.D., the chapter’s Trout in the Classroom Coordinator, with support from Dave Gregorio, who is taking on an expanded role for the coming year. Between them, they visit sixteen tanks spread across four northern New Mexico communities, and the range of ages served now runs from a pre-K classroom in Pecos (some of the youngest trout-raisers in the state) through high school biology labs.
Carlos Gilbert Elementary in Santa Fe is one of the sixteen. So is a mix of parochial, charter, and district schools across the Rio Grande and Pecos watersheds. Eggs, chillers, and program logistics come to us through the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, which supplies both hatchery rainbow trout and, where a class is set up for it, Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout: the state fish and the only trout native to this watershed.
What is actually in the tank
The classroom setup is not a decorative aquarium. It is a small piece of cold-water aquaculture. The standard rig is a fifty-five gallon glass tank, a chiller sized between a quarter and a third of a horsepower, a canister filter, an air pump, and a temperature-controlled loop that holds water in the range trout eggs actually need. National program guidance targets forty-eight to fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, with the operational band running to about fifty-seven when it has to. Miss that window and eggs die. Hit it consistently for four or five months and eggs become fry, fry become fingerlings, and fingerlings become the fish students take to the river in the spring.
Students are the ones running that system. They test dissolved oxygen and pH. They watch ammonia and nitrite through the tank’s nitrogen cycle. They learn what happens when a chiller trips and a room gets warm on a weekend. They learn, in other words, why cold, clean, well-oxygenated water is not optional for a trout. It is the same lesson we learn in the field when we walk a stream reach with River Source or the Santa Fe Watershed Association. The classroom just happens to be a fifty-five gallon version of it.
Why raising a native trout matters
Most Trout in the Classroom tanks across the country hold rainbow trout, and that is true here too. Rainbows are hardy in a hatchery setting, forgiving of the small mistakes that a first-year classroom is going to make, and easy for New Mexico Game and Fish to source. Our chapter’s rainbow classes release their fish into the Pecos River or into Monastery Lake when spring comes, and that release day is often the moment students remember for the rest of the year.
What is newer, and quietly more meaningful, is the classes that raise Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout. Rio Grande Cutthroat are a native species with a range that has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was, and every fish that leaves a classroom bound for the Rio Grande near Pilar is a small addition to a genetically careful conservation strategy. Native releases are managed to protect the local strain from hybridization with non-native rainbows, and the students who raise them do not just learn how a fish grows. They learn why some fish are here, why others are not, and why the difference matters.
A year in a classroom, start to release
A typical season looks something like this. In the fall, the chapter delivers a tank, sets up the chiller and filter, and helps the teacher stabilize water chemistry. Around the winter holidays, eggs arrive from a state hatchery. Volunteers from the chapter transport them iced and aerated, and students receive their fish already tucked into the substrate as eyed eggs. From there, the calendar is a slow biology unit: eggs hatch into alevin, alevin absorb their yolk sacs and become fry, fry begin to feed, and by early spring the tank holds a school of small trout.
Along the way, classes take field trips to the Lisboa Springs Hatchery near Pecos to see the same process at industrial scale. The curriculum lines up with Next Generation Science Standards and, in the high school labs, with AP Environmental Science. Younger classes lean on writing, drawing, and observation. Older classes lean on data tables and controlled variables. All of them, at some point in the year, learn to spell “macroinvertebrate” and to explain why what lives under a rock in a Sangre de Cristo stream tells you more about water quality than most laboratory tests.
Release day is the payoff. Students carry buckets of fingerlings down to their assigned water, acclimate the fish to stream temperature, and watch a season of care swim off into a real river. It is often the first time a student has stood in the Pecos or the Rio Grande with a purpose other than recreation.
What ages participate in Trout in the Classroom?
Every grade from pre-K through twelfth. The national program is deliberately open-ended so a teacher can meet the tank at the level their students can handle. In our chapter’s sixteen classrooms, a pre-K class in Pecos raises trout alongside a Santa Fe elementary enrichment program, a middle school science elective, and high school biology labs across four communities. The chemistry of the tank is the same in every room. The vocabulary students bring to it changes with age.
How the chapter and the community make it work
Sixteen tanks in four communities is a logistics problem before it is anything else. Volunteers pick up eggs from state hatcheries. A coordinator makes classroom visits, troubleshoots chiller alarms, and answers a lot of teacher emails. Local fly shops and partners contribute time and expertise around release days. The state department of Game and Fish provides eggs, equipment, and the regulatory permission that makes classroom rearing legal. National Trout Unlimited maintains the curriculum framework. The chapter fills the space in the middle, connecting a national program to the specific creeks, cutthroats, and classrooms of northern New Mexico.
None of this happens without the schools themselves. Every participating teacher takes on an extra science strand on top of a full curriculum. They watch water quality on weekends. They explain to a five-year-old why a fish died, when a fish dies, and celebrate with a class of high schoolers when a stubborn tank finally cycles clean.
How to get involved
If you are a teacher in northern New Mexico who would like to bring Trout in the Classroom to your school, the Truchas Chapter of Trout Unlimited would like to hear from you. If you are an angler, a parent, or a neighbor who can help move eggs, chaperone a release day, or sponsor a tank, we can use you too. The program grows the way our watersheds grow: one cold, careful, well-connected piece at a time.
The chapter’s line is “it all starts with you,” and Trout in the Classroom is one of the clearest places we know to see that sentence in action. Northern New Mexico’s cold-water fisheries are a living, shared resource for everyone downstream, and the students raising trout in Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Las Vegas, and Pecos this year are exactly the stewards those waters need next.
