At Unique High School, New York Harbor Is the Subject

June 22, 2011

A freshman class recently spent a day aboard an educational sailing ship, the Spirit of Massachusetts, rotating among work stations to study navigation, steer the ship, learn sailing basics, take water samples for testing, and more, June 2011

It’s the sole New York school reachable only by ferry, a short ride from the lower tip of Manhattan to Governors Island, a 70-hectare former military base where birds and trees greatly outnumber human visitors. The Urban Assembly New York Harbor School is located in a renovated Coast Guard building. A basketball court and a garden tended by students flank the entrance; inside, the rooms include a greenhouse, an aquaponics lab where tilapia and oysters are raised, and a boat-building workshop, where a sloop patterned on one that sailed the harbor in 1849 is under construction.

Although the Harbor School may look traditional, its curriculum and philosophy are not. Founder and program director Murray Fisher got the idea for the school when he worked for the environmental group Hudson Riverkeeper and helped establish its global network, the Waterkeeper Alliance.

“I was inspired by this model of communities taking control and taking care of their local marine ecosystems,” Fisher said. He saw an opportunity to organize a high school curriculum around an ecological restoration project, one that would give New York teens a relationship with what he says is the city’s greatest resource - the Harbor.