On campus

Drawn in: Purchase faculty offers arts, academics to area high schoolers

On Monday and Friday mornings, Sadrud-Din Shah enlightens students while keeping them totally in the dark. A photojournalism instructor, the SUNY Purchase UUPer teaches his pupils the skills and craft they’ll need to create not only artistic but journalistic photographs.

“The world is so big and its images are so important,” Shah said. “My students learn how to capture those images as artists, and then how to write about what they’ve captured.”

Shah and several other faculty members at SUNY Purchase are working collaboratively with teachers from the Westchester public school system to enrich the educational experience of students — high school students — on their campus.

Sixty-one freshmen from the Greenburgh, Harrison and Irvington school districts this fall joined dozens of sophomores from their hometowns who made up the first class of the Westchester Magnet Academy, located at SUNY Purchase. A magnet school is set up to attract students and draw them in from other schools for a particular purpose, such as racial diversity or artistic pursuits.

At the academy, the students’ academic day — which includes a traditional high school curriculum — is augmented by fine arts, foreign language and sciences taught by Purchase faculty.

“The enrichment rounds out the students’ experience and allows them to take major advantage of being at SUNY Purchase,” said UUPer Mary Beth Anderson, director of the Regional Partnership of Schools and Colleges at Purchase College, who was instrumental in bringing the program to Purchase.

A three-year federal grant to the Greenburgh district funds this creative program.

Tuned in to his experience as a jazz pianist and assistant professor at Purchase’s Conservatory of Music, Peter Malinverni taught a music theory program at the academy last year. Students learned “the musical basics” and took instrumental lessons, said Malinverni, a UUPer.

This year, he is administering the academy’s music theory and instrumental music program. Building on last year’s efforts, woodwind instruction was added to the “already thriving guitar program,” and Malinverni hopes to add a new class and a new instrument each year.

The elective allows students to “embark on what can be a lifelong journey in search of many things — most importantly, themselves — through music,” Malinverni said.

Throughout the school year, the magnet students gain access to the campus’ resources — computers, the library and college faculty — in academics as well as arts.

Experts in their disciplines, such as UUPers Nancy Foner and Peter Bell, are brought in to teach anthropology and economics, respectively, through the academy’s social studies curriculum. Chemistry professor Peter Corfield broadens the horizons of academy students by teaching them about cutting-edge research conducted in his field.

The school is striving to “bridge between a college setting and high school students,” said Marguerite Jones, the academy’s principal. She expressed great appreciation for Anderson’s efforts in getting the academy under way.

“Mary Beth Anderson is the reason the magnet is operating,” Jones said, noting that 113 students are now enrolled. Students apply for admission to the academy and are chosen by referral or by lottery.

Purchase faculty are enthusiastic about being part of the first program in the nation that is taking this new direction. It is the first public college to collaborate in a magnet with three area school districts through a federal magnet school grant, according to Steven Brockhouse, senior program officer with the U.S. Department of Education.

“We’re doing something exciting that hasn’t been done elsewhere and will serve as a model for other public institutions,” Anderson said.

— Lisa Feldman Reich