“I didn’t see a lot of them having the kinds of experiences I did when I was young, the fun, safe, engaging experiences on the water, which made me get into this line of work,” he said. “There is an environmental crisis happening right now. Why are schools not centerpieces of that battle? Why are [students] being shuffled from classroom to classroom and taught stuff they think is irrelevant, when right now, everywhere, there’s degraded ecosystems that need help?”

Fisher got in touch with Richard Kahan, a New York developer and leader of Urban Assembly, a nonprofit that operates 20 other small public schools around the city. They proposed creating a public-private academy through a program called “New Visions for Public Schools,” and later received a $34 million grant to renovate the school building.

But for its first seven years in operation, while Fisher lobbied for a permanent home on Governors Island, the school was located in Bushwick, a section of the city that is about as far from the water as it’s possible to be in New York. Students had to take the subway to see the city’s hundreds of miles of shoreline, and to practice rowing and sailing.

As of last September, though, when the move to Governors Island took place, everything happens within a few meters of the Harbor. A freshman class, for example, recently spent a day aboard an educational sailing ship, the Spirit of Massachusetts. Rotating among work stations, the students studied navigation, took turns steering the ship, and learned sailing basics. They took water samples, and tested them for oxygen levels and pollutants. Casting out a trawling net, they hauled up some of the Harbor’s animal life, which experts say remains extraordinarily varied, despite worrisomely low populations of many species. “Look at this guy,” said teacher Ann Fraioli, holding one specimen. “He’s a spider crab. We haven’t seen a lot of these this year, so it is pretty exciting to get one.”