— Filed by Evan Bourtis, WHEC News 10 NBC

Rochester, NY, July 4, 2023 — Two Rochester City School District teachers will embark on a week-long science workshop on Lake Ontario on Thursday morning.

Every five years New York Sea Grant gives teachers the chance to explore Lake Ontario in a research vessel and interact with scientists to build classroom lessons. 

The Shipboard Science Workshop is also funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

This year, seven teachers in New York State were selected to participate in the program:

• Tara Spitzer-List, Virtual Academy of Rochester
• Tucker Ruderman, World of Inquiry School, RCSD School No. #58
• Joseph Perry, Palmyra-Macedon High School
• Peter Spence, Byron-Bergen Jr/Sr High School
• Barbara Bibbins, Belleville-Henderson Central School
• Melissa Elliott, North Tonawanda High School
• Christy Pratt, Horseheads High School

The teachers will leave from the Port of Rochester. Teachers from Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin were also selected for the program.

WHEC-TV is a television station in Rochester, NY, affiliated with NBC.

For more on the 2023 Shipboard Science Workshop, including insights from the educators onboard, see NYSG's pre-workshop press release, "Educators to Learn from Scientists and NY Sea Grant Aboard Ship on Lake Ontario". There's also NYSG's post-media analysis news item, "On YouTube, On Air: Teachers Learn Aboard the Lake Guardian".

Additional video and audio clips related to this workshop can be found below ... 




More Info: New York Sea Grant

New York Sea Grant (NYSG), a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York (SUNY), is one of 34 university-based programs under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant College Program.

Since 1971, NYSG has represented a statewide network of integrated research, education and extension services promoting coastal community economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.

Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.

The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Oswego and the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University and with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County on Long Island, Brooklyn College and Cornell Cooperative Extension in NYC and Kingston in the Hudson Valley.

For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org has RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube links. NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which is published quarterly.