Smaller Learning Communities District 25 and District 28 Magnet Program

The Best of Both Worlds
The Green Magnet School offers the rich variety of academics and extracurricular activities of a large school, while providing the intimacy and personal attention of small learning communities (SLCs). The SLCs personalize each student’s learning experience and maximize each student’s growth. Strategies include family advocacy, family involvement, and mentoring programs. M. S. 217’s SLC teams provide flexible use of time and resources. Teachers differentiate Instruction, so all students can master the challenging curricula.
Green Magnet Standards: In addition to the standard middle school curriculum, each academy is developing curriculum integrating our Green Magnet Standards. We are committed to arming students with the core knowledge and skills they need to participate in shaping a more sustainable future.
Sustainability • Students explore how nature sustains life on earth. • Students explore ways to balance human needs with nature's laws. • Students investigate how to create comfortable lifestyles, so we sustain resources for future generations. Sense of Place • Students develop connections to their everyday environments by participating in authentic projects in their natural, cultural and social worlds. Inquiry • Students explore and make meaning by closely observing, formulating questions, analyzing systems, and drawing conclusions. Activism • "Think globally, act locally." • Student research issues and determine actions that can make a difference. • Students take actions to affect their local and global communities. Careers • Students connect classroom studies with future careers. • Students investigate the relationship between the market, lifestyle choices and future career paths. • Students investigate the relationship between new, evolving careers and required skills. Technology • Students use technology to achieve academic, green living and career goals. • Students use digital media to communicate individually and work collaboratively. • Students use technology to interact locally and globally.
Innovative Green Curricula. All instruction prepares students for standardized assessments and is based on the New York State and City standards. Departments have developed year-long Green Magnet curriculum maps that integrate and align Green Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings, discipline content, assessments, technology, and resources with the social studies, science, and literacy state and city curricula. Each academy has a signature focus: Law & Government, Arts & Technology, and Math & Science. Students in each discipline develop green culminating projects for monthly units.

The Best of Both Worlds

The Green Magnet School offers the rich variety of academics and extracurricular activities of a large school, while providing the intimacy and personal attention of small learning communities (SLCs). The SLCs personalize each student’s learning experience and maximize each student’s growth. Strategies include family advocacy, family involvement, and mentoring programs. M. S. 217’s SLC teams provide flexible use of time and resources. Teachers differentiate Instruction, so all students can master the challenging curricula.

Green Magnet Standards: In addition to the standard middle school curriculum, each academy is developing curriculum integrating our Green Magnet Standards. We are committed to arming students with the core knowledge and skills they need to participate in shaping a more sustainable future.

Sustainability
• Students explore how nature sustains life on earth.
• Students explore ways to balance human needs with nature's laws.
• Students investigate how to create comfortable lifestyles, so we sustain resources for future generations.

Sense of Place
• Students develop connections to their everyday environments by participating in authentic projects in their natural, cultural and social worlds. Inquiry
• Students explore and make meaning by closely observing, formulating questions, analyzing systems, and drawing conclusions.

Activism
• "Think globally, act locally."
• Student research issues and determine actions that can make a difference.
• Students take actions to affect their local and global communities.

Careers
• Students connect classroom studies with future careers.
• Students investigate the relationship between the market, lifestyle choices and future career paths.
• Students investigate the relationship between new, evolving careers and required skills.

Technology
• Students use technology to achieve academic, green living and career goals.
• Students use digital media to communicate individually and work collaboratively.
• Students use technology to interact locally and globally.

Innovative Green Curricula. All instruction prepares students for standardized assessments and is based on the New York State and City standards. Departments have developed year-long Green Magnet curriculum maps that integrate and align Green Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings, discipline content, assessments, technology, and resources with the social studies, science, and literacy state and city curricula. Each academy has a signature focus: Law & Government, Arts & Technology, and Math & Science. Students in each discipline develop green culminating projects for monthly units.

Earth Week at the Green Magnet School. We don’t just celebrate Earth Day, we celebrate Earth Week. In April, each academy and department develops an Earth Week focus. Students research and create papers, powerpoints, posters, public service announcements, poems, and documentaries on nature and environmental topics, including alternative energies, the decline in biodiversity, and the world water crisis. Math teachers integrate the water crisis, the green economy, waste management, and the decline of biodiversity into the math curriculum. In Literacy classrooms, students study biodiversity through Haiku, odes, and free verse poetry. Classes read fiction and non-fiction articles on trees, especially studying trees in our urban environment. In Social Studies students study issues around food production and consumption. All of our science classrooms are composting, and students create green exit projects..