Sarah Slack
Sarah Slack
Fellowship Placement: U.S. Geological Survey
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
Sarah Slack has taught eighth grade science and STEM in Brooklyn for the past 14 years, most recently at I.S. 223 - The Montauk School. Prior to starting her teaching career as a member of Cohort 18 of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Kalamazoo College and a Masters in Plant Biology from the University of Minnesota. She worked in environmental education and restoration for years, as an AmeriCorps intern with the Nature Conservancy, onboard educator on the Hudson River sloop Clearwater, apprentice on an organic farm, and director of a nature center for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, before bringing her love of the outdoors and environmental education to her classroom in Brooklyn, finding ways to connect students to the natural world even in a highly urbanized setting. Sarah has participated in numerous programs that have supported growth in both her practice and her science content knowledge including the Resilient Schools Consortium, the Middle School Science Leadership Team, Trout in the Classroom, Math for America, Scientist in the Classroom, the Billion Oyster Project, and the Citizen Science Teacher Experimentation program. She was awarded a Fund for Teachers grant in 2017 to study wolves in both natural and artificial settings in order to develop lessons in genetics, heredity, and evolution, and in 2019, she received support from PolarTREC to spend two months in Antarctica to study factors contributing to the melt rate of Thwaites Glacier. In 2020, she joined NASA’s Climate Change Research Initiative as part of a team studying the variation in temperature in urban environments, and has presented on this work at NSTA, AGU, and NAAEE conferences. In her term as co-chair of the NYCDOE’s Climate Education Leadership Team, she worked to engage more students and teachers in efforts to understand how our communities can build resilience in the face of a changing climate. With support from the NYCDOE’s Office of Sustainability, she created and led a three-day workshop for public school educators on strategies for investigating and mitigating climate change impacts at the local level. She is a STEAM Coach for District 20 in New York City, helping to improve the quality of STEAM education in the forty middle and elementary schools in her district. She recently received the 2022 Math for America Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education and the 2023 FLAG Award for Teaching Excellence.
