Maritime Academy helps students find their bearings, careers
You don’t have to be crazy about navigating waters to find this unusual charter public school useful ... matey.
By Jon Chavez / The Blade
Sun, 09 Aug 2020 13:30:00 GMT
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Yo Ho, Yo Ho! A pirate’s life for me.
Or maybe a chef’s life instead, or the life of a marine biologist, or even life as a nuclear engineer.
At the Maritime Academy of Toledo, a student with dreams of having a career on the water can choose to do that. But don’t be fooled, matey.
While the unusual charter school does provide a conduit for students grades 6-12 to pursue maritime occupations, being a water enthusiast isn’t a requirement although the school’s name might imply that.
Instead this unusual charter public school, located at 803 Water St. along the Toledo waterfront, provides students with many career paths but also focuses on individualized attention.
“It’s really an individualized experience. We’re never going to be a big school, but that’s the point. Students receive individual curriculums tailored to their needs,” said Aaron Lusk, the new superintendent of the Maritime Academy.
Opened in 2006 and occupying the Water Street location since 2008 when the American Maritime Officers Union moved out of the building to head for Florida, the Maritime Academy is a public school and open to all students. But it’s not your usual public school to be sure.
It has an aquatic simulator, fully operable boats, and a full-sized pool. Students or “Cadets” have uniforms and in the mornings a color guard raises the flag and they salute. Those at the school speak in nautical terms and there is strong discipline employed during school hours.
But the students and teacher there genuinely want to be there, Mr. Lusk said, and transfers out are rare. In the 2018-19 school year there were 285 students and last year only 12 students eligible to return chose not to stay.
“Most of our students come through word of mouth. Parents will tell other parents. We usually have whole families go here,” the superintendent said.
“It is a public school, so we take everybody. But class size is small,” he said. “For our middle school classes the maximum is 20 students and for high school it’s 25 maximum — but usually it’s less. Some classes only have six or seven students, and that’s one of the reasons parents choose this.
“The students like to be here, they like to be at this school. The teachers care about them. Everybody who walks into the buildings talks about how positive it is,” Mr. Lusk added.
Maricella Morales started at the Maritime Academy as a freshman, transferring there from the Lake Local Schools district. She graduated this spring as the salutatorian of her 44-member senior class and this fall will head to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. to study to become a chef.
“The Maritime Academy, it opened up a lot of opportunities for me,” Miss Morales said. “I had 18 college credits when I graduated and it helped me a lot getting where I want to be. I’m hoping to have my own restaurant or bakery in the future. I love baking.”
Miss Morales said the academy was different from her previous school experience. “They are more hands-on with their students , more one-on- one,” she said.
As for the nautical aspect, before enrolling at the academy, Miss Morales said she had never been on the water previously except aboard a cruise ship.
“I took a maritime career tech course there and I got my boating license when I was 15. They kept me going on the water,” she said. Her highlight, she added, was a two-week trip aboard the tall ship U.S. Niagara.
“That was amazing. You learned the ropes of working a real ship. You’re up at night to do your watch and you sleep in a hammock,” she said.
“The thing about (the Maritime Academy) is you have assumptions that it would be about the water, but you learn there is so much more to it. … It helps you get a job or figure out what you want to do in life,” Miss Morales said.
Mr. Lusk, a U.S. Marine Corps vet who served in the Iraq war, said the school is set up so that students can choose three different academic paths. There is a career path to occupations in the maritime industry, to traditional colleges with some students taking courses at Owens College, or a general applied path focusing on language, arts, and math.
This spring, one student received a full scholarship to Ohio State University. Two other graduates joined the U.S. Navy and qualified for its Nuclear Navy program, with one receiving training to be a nuclear engineer.
“The Ohio Department of Education only requires 20 credits to graduate. Our average graduates have 24 credits,” he said.
But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing academically for the school. In 2018 when Mr. Lusk was principal of the school, the student body took the Ohio Department of Education’s academic test and scored an “F” on performance and a “D” or “F” on closing the gap. State law calls for the closure of charter schools that score low on performance index and gap-closing measures two out of three years.
“Those test scores and that report card, I own that,” Mr. Lusk said without any attempts to shift the blame.
“Honestly, we pretty much started over as a school in 2015. We had a whole new administration and started with a variety of new teachers. We added board members and had a new board president,” he said.
The school was not prepared for that 2018 test, the superintendent said.
But this past year the Maritime Academy focused on preparing for the test — only to have the test canceled along with school.
“Quite frankly, if we’d been able to take the test this last year, we’d have been able to show what we can really do,” Mr. Lusk said.
“We worked really hard last year and then the test was canceled. Now we have to wait to test again, but I know a thousand more things about the report card test than I did then,” he added.
For Trina Vasquez, a parent who had two sons go through the Maritime Academy, the allure of school was less about how it performed on the state exam and more about how it is willing to help all students, especially those needing specialized attention.
Mrs. Vasquez's oldest son, Cade Schmidt, has a developmental disability that impeded his progress in a regular public school. The Maritime Academy, she said, was a lifeline when no others were available.
“He was basically failing school because of his disability and no one there would help me,” Ms. Vasquez said. “The Maritime Academy is about a block away from where I work and they had a sign saying they were enrolling students. They had him in there the next week and they did an (Individualized Education Plan) right IEP. There was only a month left in the school year, but it was amazing that they would do that for my child,” she said.
Cade graduated in 2019 but his younger brother, Julius Vasquez heard that the school had “great food” and wanted to go there, so Ms. Vasquez enrolled him at Maritime Academy.
Julius went through the culinary program but upon graduating this year he opted to join the U.S. Army. His mother and father, Vincent Vasquez, are both Army veterans.
“He did some classes at Owens while he was there and he got good grades. I loved it because they’re very flexible there,” Mrs. Vasquez said.
The school eventually set up a program for Cade that let him attend school for half a day, and spend the rest of the day with a school project at his house.
“Yes, some of it is they are military-esque and being a veteran, I loved that part. But they also give kids a chance where, if they make a mistake, they let them fix their mistakes,” she said.
Mr. Lusk, who began his teaching career at the academy as a special education teacher, said the academy strives to be flexible and come up with a teaching plan that works for the student, teacher, and parent.
That flexibility will pay off this fall as the Maritime Academy seeks ways to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic.
“If a parent wants a student to come on Mondays and Tuesday, and be home the rest of the week, there's no problem,” Mr. Lusk said. “We have the ability to spread out and have small classes.”
Either way, the new superintendent said his school will remain afloat in some fashion, even if it is forced to go virtual with remote learning.
“There’s going to be great things coming out of the Maritime academy and I believe that 100 percent,” he said.