New York’s hometown heroes will be fêted in NYC’s Canyon of Heroes on July 7, 2021. The New York Daily News honors its local heroes — essential workers all.
See our special NYC Hometown Heroes section here.
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As schools around the city shut down in-person classes last year, Principal Jeff Chetirko found himself navigating very choppy waters.
Though his Harbor School on Governor’s Island specializes in maritime sciences, Chetirko had no chart to follow when it came to keeping his students afloat amidst the pandemic. He simply had to follow his own North Star: making sure that everyone had access to what they needed to keep learning.
It wasn’t an easy task.
“It was a whirlwind,” Chetirko remembered. “It was really about getting the right resources into students’ hands.”
To bring the entire academic system online in a matter of days, the 45-year-old Staten Island dad crisscrossed the five boroughs in his car to drop off dozens of laptops for students without computers. He delivered 80 devices before the city Education Department shut those activities down due to health concerns.
When he wasn’t supervising his students’ transition to remote learning, he was pulling 6-12 hour shifts at child care sites for kids of essential workers. He was waking up at 4 a.m. and in bed by midnight.
“It was a fulfilling time of my life, three or four months of giving back to the real essential workers on the front lines,” said Chetirko, whose wife is a nurse.
It’s been a year since the worst of those dark, anxious days. While he’s out of survival mode, Chetirko now boards the 8 a.m. Governor’s Island ferry with a new challenge: reeling his pupils back in.
“We’re jumping right into summer school now, but the focus is, how do we reengage students in in-person learning? How we get them to come back to the building?”
To help students get re-acclimated to Governor’s Island, the Harbor School is offering two different orientation weeks this summer: one for incoming ninth graders, which happens every year, and another one for 10th graders who may feel out of touch after a year of Zoom classes.
“Many of our students were remote still, so this gives them the opportunity to come back to school in September having been here already,” Chetirko explained.
Activities will include team building icebreakers and the ever-exciting cardboard Kayak race, which ends with most competitors sinking in their infamously un-seaworthy vessels.
Thanks to a grant from the Department of Education, 11th and 12th graders will be able to run the program and make some money while they’re at it.
Though the school year will hopefully start in “normal” fashion, Chetirko emphasizes that some aspects of his school will be different — thanks to all he and his colleagues have learned over the past 16 months.
“I think a lot of mindset of myself, our administrations and teachers has changed — we were able to see a lot more of our students’ hardships,” he explained. “A lot of our conversations have shifted to ‘what are the barriers that students have in getting to the education, getting to the content.'”
Students travel to Harbor School from all five boroughs and represent a myriad of diverse backgrounds, a fact that became even more obvious to Chetirko with everyone learning from home. Now, Chetirko said, the Harbor School is working to become more attuned to the student body’s social and emotional needs.
While he looks forward to again welcoming excited teens for hands-on courses like professional scuba diving and vessel operation, Chetirko stresses the importance of looking back to remember those valuable pandemic life lessons.
“I stand here very proud of the work we did as a community.”
With Michael Elsen-Rooney
New York’s hometown heroes will be fêted on NYC’s Canyon of Heroes, celebrated by a grateful city after enduring a brutal pandemic’s toll. After 15 months of tragedy and lockdown, New York is on its way back. The war against coronavirus wasn’t won without these NY heroes — essential workers all. See our special NYC Hometown Heroes section here.
