Tuesday was their last day of school, but Cleveland high schoolers Joshua Dannison and John Vera were not at their desks.
They were aboard a small barge called Jetsam out on Lake Erie, using long poles with nets to pull out trash from the water right by Huntington Bank Field and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Dannison and Vera are among two dozen high schoolers from Cleveland Metropolitan School District who are spending their summer working various internships on the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie. In particular, their job is to man two Port of Cleveland barges, named Flotsam and Jetsam, to remove obstructions from the water after years of pollution.
Vera described some of what they found.
"There's some chip bags, some seagrass, a bunch of logs, some other trash," he said, pointing to items they'd tossed into a cloth dumpster on the boat, or "Bagster."
Dannison said sometimes they find what you’d expect. Sometimes they get a surprise.
"My second day here, it was just like full of trash here (in the harbor), and apparently the storm had dropped off a bucket full of snakes.... just slithering around everywhere," he explained.
Dannison and Vera attend Davis Aerospace & Maritime High School, which prepares students for careers in those fields. The paid internship is the result of a partnership between the Port of Cleveland and Argonaut, the nonprofit that sponsors the school.
How the partnership works
Kenayl Figueroa, a Davis alumnus, oversees the students as a deckhand.
"Throughout Davis, you get your regular boater’s license and you get opportunities to get help with your captain's license and other stuff like that," he explained.
The internship is part of a decades-long effort to clean up the Cuyahoga River, which famously caught fire at least a dozen times in the 19th and 20th centuries. Student crews on Flotsam and Jetsam, which are named for detritus cast off from ships or shipwrecks, remove over 300,000 pounds of debris each year, during a season that lasts from May to October, according to the Port of Cleveland.
Figueroa likes being a part of that legacy of cleaning up the river and lake.
"It's good for the ecosystem, and it also does help out so freighters don't get stuff stuck in their systems... It'll shut them down," he said. "It's good for that ecosystem, it's good for freighters, it is good for traffic in general."
Captain Drew Ferguson, founder and CEO of Argonaut, watches as the students board the boat from the harbor. He says this summer 25 interns are working on boats of varying sizes, from the small clean-up vessels Flotsam and Jetsam, to large freighters.
"Our students aren't out there as passengers... They're not out there just making wake. Kids from Davis, when they're out on the water, are doing their part to make it a better waterway," Ferguson said.
Other student crews assist commercial ships navigating Cleveland's harbor, partner with the U.S. Coast Guard and emergency responders and lead water rescue operations, according to a release.
Dave Gutheil, interim president and CEO of the Port of Cleveland, says since 2019, the port has provided $385,000 in grant funding to Argonaut to support high schoolers.
"One of the pillars of our strategic plan is supporting the local maritime economy," Gutheil explained. "To see kids move up and do different things in the maritime economy, and stay in it, is outstanding. Keep the talent here. We want to keep talent in Cleveland, not see it go away to somewhere else."
He says there’s a big job shortage in the maritime industry that he hopes high-school programming can alleviate.
What the students are learning
Jetsam’s Captain Sam Landgraf, its first-ever female captain who hails from Mentor, and has spent her entire career working on boats, said she enjoys preparing students for future careers. She points to a crane on the boat, meant to pick up larger obstacles like logs.
"By the end of the season, the goal is to have [students] be able to operate the crane. Our other boat has a Bobcat [excavator] on it," Landgraf said. "They can operate the Bobcat. So that's like real-life experience, that they'll have that basic knowledge of machinery. So if they go into something besides boating, there's that opportunity too."
Student Danison says running the equipment like the crane or the Bobcat excavator, which is fitted with a custom shovel with mesh for catching small debris on the other boat, is good experience. He’s considering a career in engineering.
He’s also learned a different skillset recently: activism.
Davis students protested outside Cleveland schools’ headquarters downtown this spring after the district proposed, and ultimately approved, cutting extra school time that some schools received in order to address a budget deficit. Davis was among the schools that had a longer calendar, and students argued that class time during warmer summer months was needed to help students practice on their way to future aerospace or maritime jobs.
"I was one of the students that went out and fought for all year round. So once we get back to school, it's back to a regular schedule," Danison said. "I don't really like it, but you've got to deal with it."
Ferguson said the calendar cuts will not affect the Flotsam and Jetsam internship or students' experiences at Davis in general.
"We're not going to allow any changes to negatively impact the school, the students," Ferguson said. "Argonaut exists to assure that Davis is successful."
Back on the water, the students watched Landgraf as she carefully piloted Jetsam into the harbor.
"We're just going to back up into this little slip here, and then we'll go over by the science center and see if there's any trash over there for us to pick up," she explained.
Danison said he appreciates on-the-job learning and the other benefits that come with an internship on the lake.
"It's pretty relaxing, especially on the barge. And then sometimes if we're leaving, once we're leaving Lake Erie... we pick up speed, we get to have that wake, it starts jumping a little bit. That's the more exciting part."
