Educators at Urban Assembly New York Harbor School (UANYHS), a small public high school in Brooklyn, have faced two challenges since the school opened in 2003: How can a school with a maritime theme integrated into its curriculum succeed when it is located miles away from the water? And how can teachers prepare the school’s urban students—most of whom are below grade level in math and language arts—for college success?
Despite long commutes by bus and subway to reach sites on New York Harbor, UANYHS students have been able to explore marine science on rivers, creeks, Jamaica Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean throughout the academic year, in all kinds of weather. Every student learns to swim, and UANYHS has the only sailing and rowing teams in New York City’s public schools.
“Students have incredible opportunities at Harbor if they wish to take advantage of them,” says physics teacher Noah Heller. “Students travel all over the city and as far as the Bahamas in the marine inquiries. They can sail for days on end, scuba dive, learn marine robotics, row, and get endless support from the school community.”
Partnerships with individuals, businesses, higher education institutions, and organizations have made this possible. UANYHS founder and program director Murray Fisher is a former employee of partner organization Waterkeeper Alliance, a worldwide program working to protect local communities, ecosystems, and water quality. To create UANYHS, Fisher joined with Richard Kahan of Urban Assembly, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing small college preparatory public high schools with innovative teaching practices in underserved areas of New York City. Through the Brooklyn New Century High School Initiative, a school reform program, UANYHS received a four-year implementation grant from major donors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Open Society Institute.
A partnership with South Street Seaport Museum enables UANYHS students to sail aboard the Schooner Pioneer, a 125-year-old schooner, and earn science credit as part of the Introduction to New York Harbor class. Partnerships provide students with internships and mentoring relationships with professionals in “shipping, ecology, transportation, recreation, oceanography, botany, marine biology, waterfront development, sewage and water treatment, environmental law, environment engineering, hydrology, and health,” states the school’s website (www.newyorkharborschool.org).
Gijon Polite, biology teacher and science department chair, was teaching science in Massachusetts when he heard about UANYHS. “I was most interested in the small school initiative,” he explains. “After teaching at a larger high school, I was curious to see how the small school size and the theme helped students.” The marine curriculum offers an advantage. “The opportunities and experiences the students have from freshman year on mean that you can relate classroom concepts to experiences the students have actually had,” such as checking oyster beds, testing water quality, and catching and studying fish, he observes.
The maritime theme and school size have proven effective in student learning. According to its website, in 2007 UANYHS had “an attendance rate of 88% and a 4% dropout rate; a 65% graduation rate, with a 95% college acceptance rate.” In 2008, 74% of UANYHS seniors graduated on time, while New York City’s overall graduation rate was only 60.7% that year, according to Department of Education statistics.
Because of the curriculum, Polite believes UANYHS students “are less self conscious about having an interest in science. They don’t fear judgment by their peers.” He also thinks the curriculum gives students “a clearer concept of a variety of careers and what people do in those professions, especially [in] harbor-related [careers].” Students understand “how people must work within nature but also must aim to achieve sustainability.”
Marine robotics teacher Dorick Lee says UANYHS gives students “at the minimum, an appreciation and working knowledge of the New York Harbor estuary and awareness of the human impact placed on it by the city. At the most, it provides them with a clear career path by way of college into either a marine or non-marine field.”
Sarah Gribbin, Earth science and chemistry teacher, acknowledges UANYHS faces some of the same issues other schools must deal with. “The biggest challenges are meeting the wide range of student needs and [finding] the resources available to meet those needs. Both can be overcome by collaborating with other teachers to come up with new ideas. Working across disciplines and across grades has also helped to meet the challenges that we face.”
A New Home by the Water
In Fall 2010, UANYHS will be landlocked no more. It will move to Governors Island, in the heart of New York Harbor. UANYHS will have a marina with a dock under which oysters can be raised, as well as an organic garden for “urban gardening,” reports Polite. Since the island offers a more varied selection of birds and trees to study, he says the move “will definitely improve our ecology education.”