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Blue Schools

Blue Schools Initiative: Connecting community and environment to the future of the maritime industry. 

While you might not think of it, the maritime sector supports every kind of activity in our entire state and beyond. From the vehicles we drive to the food on our table to the products we sell to other places—virtually everything we sell or consume at some point traveled across the water. 

Right now there aren’t enough maritime workers for our current activity, let alone the exciting innovations just over the horizon. 

Northwest Maritime is spearheading a regional effort to boost awareness and involvement in maritime opportunities through the Blue Schools Initiative. This initiative merges experiential education with real-world academic applications, fostering career readiness in the high-demand, high-wage maritime sector, with a particular focus on increasing participation from underrepresented communities.

Community-Centered Career Development

Leveraging nearly 50 years of experience engaging communities in maritime experiences, Northwest Maritime is expanding its expertise into new communities, aiming to transform workforce development and career education in Western Washington. The Blue Schools funnel approach starts at the community level, introducing maritime careers through grade school and middle school experiences, making maritime pathways a familiar choice by the time students are ready for career education.

Purpose-driven learning: career skills, academics, environmental resilience

We know that learning by doing is powerful-—academic concepts come alive when you contextualize through real-world application. We have seen the power of those activities harnessed in service of something relevant to a student’s community. Blue Schools finds ways for maritime skills to be acquired and practiced through environmental restoration. Not all of our students will go on to careers in restoration, but the skills they will apply through that work are immediately applicable in other maritime careers. The restoration work makes the learning relevant to the students and increases a student’s sense of ownership for the blue parts of the map. 

Maritime Funnel Diagram Branded No Arrows

Current Pilot Communities

South Seattle: Maritime High School 

Olympic Peninsula: Port Townsend Maritime Academy

Whatcom County: Coming Soon

In these pilot communities, existing resources are combined and enhanced to replicate a proven system, strengthening the student-to-career pipeline.

Three Pathways, One Outcome

The maritime sector is vast and complex, but Blue Schools simplifies it into three main pathways: Marine Construction, Vessel Operations, and Marine Resources. The goal is to increase the overall number of people entering the sector, guiding students to find the path that interests them, with market forces eventually aligning their careers with industry needs.

Interested in learning more? Contact us: Katelyn Kean at katelyn@nwmaritime.org

Harbor School Case Study

A compelling case study is New York City’s Harbor School. The Harbor School is an 800-student, public high school that over the course of its 20-year history has engaged and graduated thousands of students who have gone on to maritime careers and in doing so have helped change the demographics of New York’s waterfront. At the core of their approach is their partnership with the non-profit Billion Oyster Project, whose mission and mandate is to repopulate New York harbor with a billion oysters as both environmental restoration and rebuilt defenses for mitigating storm surges that come with sea level rise. The harbor school teaches its academic and career-based curriculum around the tasks of growing and placing these restored oyster beds: aquaculture students grow oysters; welding students weld the cages oysters are placed in; vessel operations students learn to operate boats that take the oyster filled cages to the sites; and students learning to be commercial divers install them on the bottom. Other students are involved in engineering and permitting, monitoring and policy. The approach creates instructional context and the opportunity for the students’ relationship to the material change from obligatory to inspired; they aren’t just learning job skills, their efforts are contributing to the long-term environmental health of their community. 

The Blue Schools Initiative is an effort to use Northwest Maritime’s deep experience in community programming to translate the Harbor School’s approach into the geographic and cultural context of Western Washington. In doing so, work to create a template that could be applied to communities nationwide.