Students celebrate internships at Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies

For students at the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, Friday was pass-the-torch day, as they celebrated the end of last semester’s internship program and helped younger students through mock job interviews.

The school’s eleventh-graders get out of school two hours early twice a week to work at places like the Prospect Park Zoo and the Brooklyn Library as part of the school’s experiential-learning program. (BCS’s high school is also one of the city’s 26 “Consortium” schools whose students don’t take most Regents exams.)

Enrique Boone and officer Julius Hudson, who supervised Boone’s internship. (Sarah Darville)

As younger students rotated through classrooms asking questions, eleventh-grader Enrique Boone said he interned at Brooklyn’s 84th Precinct, riding his bike from Carroll Gardens to downtown Brooklyn where he mostly filed papers. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds, he said.

“The police are real organized with their paperwork, and if you mess something up, it makes things harder for them,” he explained.

But did he see anything exciting happen?

“All the stuff I saw in the precinct was confidential, but I assure you I have some crazy stories,” Boone said.

The school’s principal, Alyce Barr, noted that Chancellor Carmen Fariña was one of her “education mentors” and had ties to the school’s beginnings, since Fariña was superintendent when the school opened in District 15 in 2001. Mayor Bill de Blasio was also on the district’s school board at the time.