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New York Academy of Sciences Education Coordinator Stephanie Wortel and Emoni Toure, 13, examine a bobcat skull.

This summer, Donald Doehrer learned to identify the skull of a predatory animal by its fang-like front teeth and eye sockets in the front of the head.

He is now eager to explain how to extract DNA from a banana at home, and how many cells are in the human body (several trillion)—concepts he learned while attending a free science class at the Children’s Aid Society’s Frederick Douglass Campus.

But the highlight of the summer class, according to Doehrer, 12, who is entering seventh grade at PS 165, was viewing worm cells through a high-powered microscope for the first time.

“They showed us how small cells could be,” he said. “They said each worm had 90,000 to 100,00 cells. I didn’t think it was possible, then they turned up the magnification on a worm, and we could see all these little white blotches that were cells.”

Doehrer is one of nearly 600 students from low-income backgrounds receiving supplementary science and math instruction this summer from scientists who are being trained as teaching fellows by the New York Academy of Sciences. The program, which places city graduate students in the sciences in after-school and summer classrooms administered by the Department of Youth and Community Development throughout the city, just completed its pilot year.

The students, most of them minorities who hail from neighborhoods with high poverty and low high school graduation rates, are attending summer programs run by the Children’s Aid Society and other community organizations that offer free day- and after-school care. The NYAS offers several three-week long science curricula and a math curriculum, which are taught by different scientists at each site.

The new program comes at a time when the federal government has made improving science education a priority, particularly for states vying for second-round Race to the Top money. (more…)