A new STEAM Center planned for the Brooklyn Navy Yard would help provide students with real-world work experience in emerging tech professions, officials say.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams and New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza unveiled this week plans for the Brooklyn STEAM Center, which they billed as a “state-of-the-art educational hub.”
STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, and the new Brooklyn Navy Yard center aims to provide high schoolers will educational courses, work experience and professional contacts in those fields.
“High-quality Career and Technical Education is a critical part of our Equity & Excellence for All agenda to put every student on the path to college and careers,” Carranza said in a statement. “The new, first-of-its-kind Brooklyn STEAM Center is an invaluable investment and will give Brooklyn students a new access point for active, real-world learning experiences.”
Why a STEAM Center at the Brooklyn Navy Yard?
The center will be on the third floor of Building 77 at Brooklyn Navy Yard and will serve, at capacity, 350 to 400 total high school juniors and seniors from eight Brooklyn public schools each year.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard has become one of the city’s fastest growing tech hubs and the center of a surge in manufacturing. The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) recently reported the most single-year hires in its 19-year history, with the manufacturing field taking up the majority of those new roles.
The Brooklyn STEAM Center will help prepare even more New York City residents for those kinds of jobs, officials say. The Center comes out of a partnership between the New York City Department of Education and BNYDC.
The curriculums at the STEAM Center will focus on five career paths, which officials say were selected because of their presence at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as well as their overall job market potential. Those pathways are computer science, construction technology, culinary arts and business, design and engineering, and film and media.
Though the STEAM center will serve enrolled juniors and seniors, New York City students will be first introduced to the program as freshman and sophomores so that they can be familiarized with the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the program’s core requirements.
The first group of Brooklyn STEAM Center students were picked in the 2015-16 school year as freshman. The center is temporarily located at two locations, the Boys and Girls High School and the George Wingate Education Complex in East Flatbush, before it will move into Building 77 at Brooklyn Navy Yard. Borough President Adams allocated $5 million to the Brooklyn STEAM Center.
