Announcing our Virtual Blue Team Internship Program!

Pictured above - Students participate in this year's Winter Water Academy.

CURB’s education and research team have spent the spring re-envisioning a virtual educational opportunity for 10 Yonkers teens from Lincoln and Saunders High Schools. We are proud to announce that our Hudson River Blue Team will continue in its second year, and while it will be presented in a different iteration, we are confident the students will get as much out of it as last year’s on-site researchers. The Blue Team was started in 2019 as part of a tiered program funded by the NYS DEC’s Office of Environmental Justice, hosting 10 Yonkers Public School students as paid summer interns to collect and process water samples 3 times a day, 4 days a week, for 5 weeks. All of the students previously attended the Winter Water Academy at CURB and built on their knowledge to gain real research and lab skills over the summer to analyze the effect of Combined Sewer Overflows on our Hudson River ecosystem.

This year, though our Blue Team will be entirely virtual, our students will still meet with our Science Coordinator and Director of Education weekly to study water science, data analysis, environmental solutions, and outreach methods for disseminating their knowledge of the Hudson River and its pollution issues. By the end of the program, these 10 Yonkers high schoolers will work in small groups to create a variety of public communications that will be both peer-reviewed and observed by real experts in the field. We are so excited to work with these students to help engage them in their community and get a deeper understanding of their underwater backyard.