Susan Vincent keeps minnow traps and waders in her Manhattan classroom — they come in handy when the high-school science teacher takes her students on summer canoe trips to Piermont Marsh on the Hudson River to research the ecosystem.
“Inner-city girls don’t have a lot of experience with the out-of-doors,” said Vincent, who teaches Earth and marine science at the all-female Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem.
“Many of them don’t go to Central Park, which is three blocks from the school.
“When you turn them on to nature and what’s going on in the environment and the needs of the animals, they get indignant when they see trash floating in the marsh.”
One of several field trips is a summer Piermont Marsh research project supervised by Columbia University in which the students head to the Hudson River estuary. They paddle canoes to the marsh and work to “establish a baseline profile of animals that use the marsh as habitat,” Vincent said.
And every spring. the Young Women’s Leadership Network funds a wetlands research trip for her students to the Mississippi River delta.
“My goal is for the girls to be knowledgeable about the world they’re living in,” said Vincent, a 64-year-old grandmother, who this year won three national educator awards.
“You can’t be a good citizen unless you know how the Earth operates and how we enhance our own quality of life by preserving other habitats.”
Vincent was nominated for a New York Post Liberty Medal in the Educator category by her school’s principal, Althea Tyson.