Objective 3.1: Community Partnerships
HHA has very active partnerships. As you will see below, some partnerships bring entities into our school, some partnerships bring students out into our community, and some partnerships are both in the school and in the community.
Patterson Park Audubon
Description: HHA has a long standing relationship, over 15 years, with our local Audubon Organization. In addition to our pre-K through 3rd grade participating in quarterly classes, we have partnered with them to create bird and pollinator gardens on our school grounds. During the 2018-19 school year we have added classes for the 4th and 5th grade students.
Community members who gathered to help create our native gardens
Planting Native plants to create bird habitats.
Student simulating the flight of the monarch
Chesapeake Outward Bound
Description: Chesapeake Outward Bound
HHA has committed to environmental literacy and outdoor education through their eight-year partnership with Outward Bound. Each fall, sixty 7th grade students embark on a week-long outdoor adventure either backpacking along the Appalachian Trail or canoeing and camping along the Potomac River. While on course, these students completely disconnect from social media and reconnect with their core values and with nature.
Students camping, canoeing, and hiking at Outward Bound
Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Description: Chesapeake Bay Foundation has been a fabulous resource and partner for our environmental education at HHA. Not only have they provided us with professional development opportunities for many of our staff, they are a wealth of information for teaching resources and student programs.
Friends of Patterson Park
Description: HHA families and students are active partners with Friends of Patterson Park helping with trash pickup, tree planting and volunteering at community events.
HHA community members planting trees in Patterson Park
Students collecting trash from Patterson Park boat lake
Hampstead Hill PTO
Description: This fabulous partner supports our greening efforts in so many ways. At a recent faculty meeting they provided every staff member with a reusable water bottle. They also provided the funding for trash grabbers to assist us with all the neighborhood and park trash clean-ups.
Reusable water bottle from HHA PTO
PTO member handing our water bottles during a faculty meeting
Student using trash grabber provided by the PTO
5th grade students doing a litter clean up at the boat lake in Patterson Park
National Aquarium AQUAPARTNERS
Description: In the 2019-2020 school year, Hampstead Hill Academy has partnered with The National Aquarium AQUAPARTNERS PROGRAM. This program provided two environmental education programs in our school for our 3rd grade and one field experience at the Carrie Murray Nature Center. In addition, as part of this partnership, 30 of our 7th grade students were invited to visit the Animal Care and Rescue Center in April.
We are a nonprofit organization whose mission is to inspire conservation of the world’s aquatic treasures
Third graders at Carrie Murray Nature Center
Canton Community Association's "Canton Canopy"
Description: Established in 2017, Canton Canopy is an all-volunteer run initiative operating in affiliation with the Canton Community Association and with support from the Baltimore City Forestry Board and Baltimore City Urban Forestry Division. Canton Canopy's mission is to facilitate the planting of trees in existing tree pits, fundraise and apply for grants in order to cut new tree pits, and organize volunteers to help with the care and maintenance of the community's trees. Students, teachers, and HHA parents have volunteered many hours with this organization to plant and maintain trees on the streets around the school and throughout the Canton neighborhood.
HHA parent and student planting tree in Canton
HHA parent and students planting tree
BioEYES
Description: BioEYES is a K-12 science education program which provides classroom-based learning opportunities through the use of live zebrafish. BioEYES is designed to incorporate teacher empowerment and provides professional development seminars and a co-teaching experience with trained science consultants, called outreach educators. For the past five years, this organization has been a partner with HHA and has been bring science lessons into the 7th grade classroom. This program is through the The Carnegie Institution for Science in Baltimore, MD which is housed at Johns Hopkins University.
Seventh graders participating in BioEYES classroom lesson
Blue Water Baltimore
Description: Blue Water Baltimore not only provided training for storm drain stenciling, they provide the powerpoint so we can educate the students about why it is so important to protect our waterways and the kits so our student groups could adopt and stencil storm drains.
Students participating in Blue Water Baltimore's storm drain stenciling