Tags: education

The exterior has been wrapped in vinyl. Microscopes and lab equipment have been safely stowed away. The disco ball has been installed.

This October, Freshkills Park’s Mobile Education Lab will host field trips for middle and high school students from across New York City for the first time ever.

This summer, NYC Parks staff have been working hard to re-imagine education programs at Freshkills Park. The landfill-to-park transformation is a poignant backdrop for education—each day, we witness how ecology, engineering, design, history and social sciences interact to solve 21st century challenges.

For the past year, students at the Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn took a deep dive into New York City’s trash. The partnership was part of the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s Urban Investigations program. Students research pertinent issues in their community then, with the help of a Teaching Artist, learn how to share their information in a meaningful way.

As the National Park Service celebrates its centennial, the organization has identified a major problem: a shocking lack of diversity.

Parks are finding it hard to attract young visitors and visitors of color. According to a recent National Park Service survey, Hispanic visitors make up 9% of total visitors, Black visitors 7%, Asian visitors 3% and Native American/American Indian visitors 1%.

To reach the goal of sending zero waste to landfills by the year 2030, New York City has identified  more than 100 pilot schools to serve as “Zero Waste Schools” in Brooklyn, Manhattan,  and Staten Island.

Zero Waste Schools Initiative (ZWSI) is a joint partnership of the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) and the New York City Department of Education (DOE), alongside Grow NYC’s Recycling Champions Program (RCP).

After learning about Freshkills Park through tours and presentations, Saint Adalbert teacher Donna Dawson assigned a final project for her 8th graders to create an interpretive model of the park’s future, encouraging the use of recyclable materials. The students assumed the role of urban park planners, conducted research, constructed practical visions of the park, and wrote accompanying reports.

Once an abandoned area, Brooklyn Bridge Park slowly transitioned into a model destination for environmental science, green design and public recreation. In September 2015, Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy opened the Environmental Education Center located at 99 Plymouth Street.  The Center features interactive programming related to the park’s historic identity, sustainable construction and ecological implications with noteworthy highlights such as the touch tank and the structural model of the Brooklyn Bridge Park.

As Freshkills Park develops from the world’s largest landfill into a sustainable urban park, New York City is working towards sending zero waste to landfills by the year 2030. This 0x30 Initiative is under the April 2015 initiative known as One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City (OneNYC).

Fifteen years ago this week, the final barge of household garbage arrived at Fresh Kills Landfill. To celebrate this milestone, the website’s new interactive landfill-to-park timeline illustrates almost 100 years of changes in the area.

The last barge to Fresh Kills marked the end of 53 years of landfill operations.

Freshkills Park will offer Discovery Day events on May 15th and June 26th, 2016 from 11am to 4pm. During these free events, 700 acres of the otherwise closed site will be open for tours and recreation.

On February 9th, students at James Madison High School built a chain of plastic bags around the school building in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The project was meant to raise awareness about excessive use of the material and its harmful impact on the environment.

This spring, 6th-12th grade students in Staten Island will have the chance to participate in a Citizen Science water monitoring project at Freshkills Park. The project will be overseen by Manager of Science and Research Development Cait Field and fellow NYC Department of Parks and Recreation staff.

It’s easy to make resolutions at the start of the new year, but many of us struggle with keeping them for more than a few months. Fortunately, Freshkills Park will be there to help you accomplish a wide variety of goals in 2016.

Freshkills Park staff provides free programs to schools across New York City that allow 3rd-12th grade students to expand their knowledge on the living evolution of Freshkills from a landfill to a park. These learning opportunities,  including ecological implications, community outreach, design and the arts, are not only available in a classroom setting, but in an outdoor environment as well.

Freshkills Park has a lot to be thankful for. In honor of Thanksgiving, we would like to express our gratitude to:

DSNY for their partnership on this great project.

Park Manager Bonnie Williams and her wonderful crew for caring for those sections of Freshkills Park already built.

This year, more than 900 people applied for a position with New York City’s Parks Fellowship & Conservation Corps. The increasingly popular program is a 40-week public service commitment in which individuals are assigned to divisions throughout the agency to help protect and enhance New York City’s parks and natural resources.

In mid-December, the Freshkills Park Development Team took a trip to visit the Black Rock Forest Consortium in Cornwall, NY. The Consortium manages 3,838 acres of forest with a scientific research field station on site. The team met with Dr. Bill Schuster, Black Rock’s Executive Director, who gave an overview of the facilities at the station and the research and scientific programming taking place, and led the team on a tour into the forest to visit some of the current research sites towards fostering ideas for the future of the scientific research program at Freshkills Park.

The Freshkills Park Team endeavors to keep up with innovative programming and research on NYC Waterways and recently took a ferry to Governor’s Island to visit the Harbor School, home of the Billion Oyster Project. The Harbor School provides a truly unique maritime program for high school students with a curriculum built around restoring one billion oysters to New York Harbor. 

For the sixth grade students at Marsh Avenue Expeditionary Learning School (MAELS), their visit to Freshkills Park was not an ordinary field trip. Like any group of students on a Freshkills Park walking tour, they played the role of park planners as they designed structures to keep stray soccer balls out of the landfill gas well heads, worked together to decipher the correct order for a series of maps about the park’s history, and participated in stakeholder role-playing exercise where they debated priorities for the future park.