Inglewood Students Spending Weekend at USC Marine Biology Station

What: More than 30 high school students from Inglewood will be at the San Pedro/Terminal Island waterfront at about 8:30 a.m. Friday to board a vessel for Catalina Island and a weekend stay at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center.

These kids are part of a marine biology club at Animo Leadership Charter High School. Their instructor, Mark Friedman, says this marine biology program is rare — if not unique — for inner city schools that are not magnet schools. It’s open to all students, and it also offers an honors course (a college level equivalent) for qualifying seniors.

Six of the students recently won a trip to the USC labs on Catalina Island as part of the 2008 QuikSCience Challenge competition sponsored by USC, Quiksilver and the Quiksilver Foundation. To raise money to get the entire club on boats across the San Pedro Channel, the students sold donated Odwalla bars at school and raised $500, and they also applied some funds from a Whale Tail Grant (from the California Coastal Commission) that they wrote and received during the 2005/2006 fiscal year.

When: 8:30 a.m., Friday, April 25

Who: Mark Friedman is the Inglewood teacher who will be leading the group. His cell phone is (310) 350-7515.

Staff and students affiliated with USC and the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies will accompany Friedman and the students. The Wrigley contact is Kathleen Ritterbush, education assistant at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies; contact her by cell phone at (805) 231-6980 or by email at ritterbu@college.usc.edu.

Where: Southern California Marine Institute, 820 South Seaside Avenue, Terminal Island. For directions, go to scmi.us/category/directions.

More: More information about the QuikSCience Challenge competition can be found at www.usc.edu/org/cosee-west/quikscience/winners_2008.html.

The weekend trip to Catalina Island is just part of the story about these students and their club at Animo Leadership Charter High School. They’ve done outreach projects in Spanish about keeping pollutants from reaching the ocean through storm drain runoff, they’ve participated in the National Ocean Science Bowl, and several of the seniors are going off to college next year to study marine science.

Animo Leadership Charter High School was No. 31 on a list of the top 100 schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report as “Gold Medal Schools” in November 2007. For more, see www.usnews.com/articles/education/high-schools/2007/11/29/gold-medal-schools.html.

Animo Leadership Charter High School
1155 West Arbor Vitae Street
Inglewood, CA 90301
(310) 216-3277
(310) 216-3947 (fax)
www.greendot.org/leadership/

Contact: Richard Hoops, USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, at (213) 740-1803 or hoops@usc.edu

From University of Southern California Media Relations
Los Angeles, Calif.
Tel: (213) 740-2215
Fax: (213) 740-7600