Kids at Work

A great video of the kids at work in the boat shop and this year's boat launching event at Jamaica Pond

Greetings!  

Support from several foundations, hundreds of individuals and our amazing crew of volunteers over the past year has helped us serve more children than ever. We are writing to ask for your continued support to stabilize and expand our work. 

I have always felt that calling low student test scores an "achievement gap" was blaming the students for something that was out of their control. The real issue is an opportunity gap which we are working to close. We continue to demonstrate that giving students exciting learning opportunities enables them to close the achievement gap on their own.

100 students at the Dennis Haley Elementary School are now benefiting from an expanded range of experiential learning opportunities. The core, hands-on activities of boat building and oral histories of African-American contributors to our maritime heritage have been enhanced with on the water learning programs on the World Ocean School schooner, the Roseway. In June all fourth graders were on board for 5 days of sailing and then in September, as fifth graders, they spent another day aboard pulling lines, climbing rigging and grasping the physics and math of sailing and navigating a ship.

We have also partnered with the Flaherty Pool to offer swimming lessons this winter to all 5th graders. This effort will give students the safety qualification required to row the boats they built which are now housed at the Jamaica Pond public boathouse. In collaboration with a new health improvement program of the Boston Public Health Commission our students will also be able to participate in a Saturday rowboat racing program this spring.    

These new initiatives and partnerships add depth and breadth to our students' opportunity to learn. MCAS results from the past 2 years show that our efforts are paying off. The students who participate in our programs are showing significant improvements in skills we have shown them are relevent in real life. This year we have analyzed the data and are expanding our effort to improve student understanding and relevence of geometry. Call us for more specifics on student test results               .

Your support will also help us plan for the future. We are convening experts, school officials, and major youth serving non profits to look at expanding experiential learning opportunities for Boston Public School students. As our program reaches more students, receives increasing attention, and produces results, we believe that it can be a model for engaging additional schools in expanded experiential learning opportunities.

Your (continuing) support will be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to talk with me about our efforts. 

John Rowse

617-595-8557 

johnrowse@bostonfamilyboatbuilding.org