Passing state Regents exams is about to pay off for several dozen Brooklyn middle school kids - and possible future colleagues of mine - with your help.
About 40 seniors from the Academy for Young Writers in Williamsburg will skip school for two weeks in January.
If enough positions can be found, they will spend those weeks at unpaid internships at businesses around the city.
The two-week job is an extension of Academy's founder and Principal Carolyn Yaffe's education philosophy.
"We are an exhibition-based- on-instruction school," Yaffe said. "It is important that students see how what they are doing in the classroom is connected to the world outside the classroom."
Yaffe and Assistant Principal Courtney Winkfield got the idea for the internship program while attending a professional development seminar last summer.
The seniors eligible for the internships - scheduled to run Jan. 11 through Jan. 22 - have completed all state Regents exam requirements to graduate.
They will head to real world jobs - which internship coordinator Joana Florez said do not have to be media-related - while other students are doing Regents exam preparations.
Winkfield said this is the first year the unpaid internship program has been attempted.
"We want students to get real-world application of whatever it is they are learning," Winkfield said.
Yaffe taught school in the Bronx and was an instructor in the city's Teaching Fellows Program when she wrote a proposal to start the Academy as part of the Department of Education's "New Schools Initiative" program.
In partnership with the Institute for Student Achievement, a national program that sponsors initiatives to help turn around low-performing schools, and with a four-year grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Yaffe, Winkfield and four other teachers started the school with 90 students.
Located on the fifth and half of the fourth floors of Middle School 50 on S. Third St. in Williamsburg, the Academy now has 27 teachers and nearly 400 students.
The school provides a rounded education while living up to its name, Winkfield said.
"One of the foundations of the school is the belief that if a student can critically read and write - but particularly can critically write about anything - they are going to be successful in the world," she said. "Whether they go on to be journalists, doctors, lawyers or work for the MTA, if they are able to really process information and think critically, they are going to be successful."
So students write, write and write some more.
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