CHAPIN, S.C. — Students at the Center for Advanced Technical Studies are selling poinsettias they raised themselves. This Lexington Richland District 5 school allows students to enroll in classes that will help them better realize their professional potential. They have classes dealing with media, technology, health sciences and much more. This particular class is Agricultural and Bio-systems Engineering taught by Kevin Sox, “It really focuses on all of the processes that go through agriculture,” Sox says of the class, “I utilize the greenhouse to teach plant science and we grow a crop of poinsettias.” The class begins the process in August and then sells them for a week in December. “My kids really enjoy these classes because they’re hands on,” Sox tells Street Squad, “These kids are really surprised because they’ve gone through 10 years where they sit in a classroom and they get to go out in a shop or a greenhouse and they get to actually do things with their hands.” RELATED: ‘So this is students helping students’: Middle school students collect warm clothes for classmates Zach Grey, one of Sox’s students says the class is very hands-on, “its very fun and interactive. You get to do wood working, welding and electricity, its a lot of basic needs you need to know for when you own a house and all.” As far as the poinsettia care, “its nice to know that you actually grew the plant and people buy them off of you.” “We start off the first week of August,” Isaac Knight, another student in the class of all juniors and seniors, tells us, “we get 800 cuttings for the poinsettias, we plant them in the pots and we disperse them around the greenhouse.” Knight says they come weekly throughout the semester to maintain the plants, […]