NAUGATUCK, Conn. (WTNH) — It’s taking the term higher education to another level. Naugatuck Valley Community College (NVCC) is offering a course on cannabis production.
“This has been a long time coming,” explained the professor of horticulture at NVCC, Christopher Tuccio. “It was around 2015, 2014 that we saw other states, like Colorado, areas of California, out west starting to change their laws in relation to marijuana use.”
Eventually Tuccio said, they jumped in with both feet and decided to do a cannabis course. With Connecticut legalizing marijuana, gone are the days of just reading, writing, and arithmetic.
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With two campus sites, Waterbury and Danbury, NVCC is the state’s only community college that offers a degree in horticulture. Tuccio said students will learn all aspects of cannabis production.
“Quite literally from the ground up. They’ll have to learn about soil, soil fertility, a variety of different scientific components like soil PH. From there, plant nutrition, the different elements that make up plant nutrition. And then, growing the cannabis plant itself.”
Right now the course is running virtually online. “What that means is they’ll log on with an instructor on a live lecture session,” Tuccio said. “They’ll do their lecture virtually on a zoom-type based interface.”
With a new, or “pilot” course, usually, that means they would be at low, single-digit numbers. For their course, 15 students have signed up for the fall semester.
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Tuccio said that’s pretty good. He also said that NVCC grads can easily transfer to the University of Connecticut for their bachelor’s degree. UConn is the only other college in the state that offers a horticulture degree.
