Wouldn’t it be fun to spend to spend your junior and senior years at the zoo? I had a chance to visit the Zoo Academy at Henry-Doorly Zoo during the school board conference. The zoo has three classrooms below the ticket office and 1 below the desert dome. Papillion-Lavista High School rents these classrooms and operates a zoo academy at the school. The academy is open to juniors and seniors. They take all of their classes at the zoo. The day is divided into 4 two hour blocks. The students were taking English, math, and social studies classes during the current quarter, and had a two hour internship. During the internship, I saw students feeding Jellyfish, cutting up food for the sharks, doing research on what blood is better for baby vampire bats, and working with fertilized embryos. The program accepts up to 80 students.
The zoo also offers summer programs for students outside of Omaha. I believe those programs run three weeks and have a fee.
Academy programs are springing up all over the United States. The zoo academy is the most innovative in Nebraska. The Henry-Doorly Zoo has plans to expand the program in the future. Pending state approval, the zoo wants to build a school on the Rosenblatt property. It would be a charter school, not affiliated with any school district, and open to any interested students. Since charter schools are not legal in Nebraska, they will have to work with the Department of Education and the Nebraska Unicameral to legally operate a Zoo School. Nebraska needs to support these opportunities for its students. The fear is that Charter schools will accept only high performing students, and leave the job of educating low performers to the public schools. As long as the zoo school is not taking state aid away from the public schools, then we need to do what is best for the students.
