Harbor School
By Melissa L. Jones
Photos by Harbor School
In September of 2004, I boarded an M train at the Myrtle/Wyckoff station for a field trip with 25 thirteen and fourteen year-old native New Yorkers. Riding underground beneath Brooklyn my students snacked on barbecue chips, chatted about their new crush and sat listening to headphones. Suddenly, the train burst from the tunnel into the light of the Manhattan Bridge. The kids jumped from their seats and leaned against the Plexiglas on the south-facing windows. The East River, Statue of Liberty and Governor’s Island rolled by. “Ahhh, tight, Miss! Look!” They were rapt. Most of these kids had never seen New York Harbor.

Murray Fisher founded the New York Harbor School to introduce high school students to the Harbor in their backyard – the busiest seaport in the world, less than two miles from their urban homes. The goal of the Harbor School is to use hands-on learning and the skills of a waterman to teach and empower underserved kids. Partners include Urban Assembly, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating college-prep schools in urban areas, the South Street Seaport Museum and Waterkeeper Alliance.

The school opened its doors in 2003 to 125 ninth graders from the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bushwick, Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Ninety-five percent of our student body is eligible for free lunch. Twenty-five of our students had limited English proficiency and 12 were mandated for special education services. Others came from some of the city’s best middle schools, bringing with them top-notch reading and writing skills. At the beginning, the only thing our diverse student body seemed to have in common was a universal unawareness of the Harbor.

But that changed quickly. Students were immediately challenged to learn seamanship skills aboard our 100-year-old historic schooner, the Lettie G. Howard. Along with math, English and science, students learn boat building and navigational techniques in our Marine Technology course. They learn the basic tenets of conservation and environmental science in our Harbor Science program. Students who had never been on the subway before now travel throughout the city to sail on the Hudson, row boats on the Bronx River, or do water quality testing in Central Park Lake. Slowly, our ragtag crew of ghetto fabulous thugs, recent Latin American immigrants and overachieving college-prep stars were adding words like “starboard” and “bow,” “salinity” and “poly-chloralinate biphenyls” to their vocabularies.

Our little school certainly faced many challenges in its first year. Most of our students came from failing elementary and middle schools. The rigorous academic environment here requires that they perform at or above grade level in order to succeed. We faced resistance from parents, unsure of our experiential learning techniques, to taking their kids onto the water and on overnight sailing trips. We also struggled with how to connect the academic learning students did in the classroom with the hands-on learning they completed on water.

Part of the answer came with the inauguration of the Waterkeeper Mentor Project. In 2004 we launched an interdisciplinary project to connect our students with local Waterkeepers around the globe. As mentors, the Waterkeepers help students connect their studies with real world problems that Waterkeepers face protecting their waterways.

The project began with a discussion of the processes that Waterkeepers follow when they solve problems in their region. We discussed how “stewards” care for something by identifying problems, generating questions, gathering data, developing and then implementing solutions and then reflecting on the process. This Waterkeeper Stewardship Model serves as a structure for our learning throughout the course – and throughout their high school career.

To begin the project, each student chooses a mentor from the list of Waterkeepers around the globe. Some chose Waterkeepers whose names sounded glamorous. Octavia loved the name, “Buzzards Baykeeper.” Tenesha loved “Blackwater Nottaway Riverkeeper.” Others chose Waterkeepers in regions where they have family, like Juan, who chose the New Riverkeeper, or Vimla with the Thames Canalkeeper. There were spirited arguments over the various Latin American regions, including Vieques and Punta Abreojos. Daniel, always an original, chose Georges Waterkeeper for its sheer exoticism.

Students began Web research gathering information on the waterbody. Next, they wrote letters to their Waterkeeper requesting information. Writing the letters was tough. Most students had never written a professional letter before. We went through many drafts to remove the “yo”s, curse words and misspellings. We mailed our letters and waited.

Soon, responses from Waterkeepers started pouring in. Sammy was one of the first students to hear back: the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper sent him a thick, heavy packet. Sammy tore it open excitedly in front of the whole class, then let out a loud, frustrated cry. “What is it? What’d you get?” we asked him.

“It’s a book!” he said, disappointed, as if he had requested candy and not information. He began reading the book during silent reading, though, and took copious notes.

Other students received email responses, and we worked hard to keep ourselves organized. We called in our science teacher, Roy Arezzo, several times during the project to define scientific terms like “catchment.” We created outlines and started working on our reports. As the pieces fell into place, I was impressed by how much my students were able to find out through research and by working with their mentors about their waterways around the globe.

This fall we’ll welcome a new cadre of 10th graders into the project, engaging another 50 Waterkeepers in the mentorship process.

The Waterkeeper Mentor Project blends the twin aims of our school almost seamlessly. Students created an academic research project that required high-level reading, writing, research and technological skills. Meanwhile, they were able to connect this academic learning to the experiential, hands-on learning they do in their Harbor courses.

We look forward to the coming school year and continuing our interdisciplinary projects that involve the vast, multi-cultural resources of the Waterkeeper Alliance in the education of some of the neediest kids in New York City.