WISE Services

So it was refreshing to visit Woodlands High School in Greenburgh on Friday and catch up with Vic Leviatin. I first met Vic 25 years ago when I was starting at the Journal News and Greenburgh was one of the school districts I was assigned to cover. At the time, Vic was about 15 years into nurturing something called the Woodlands Individualized Senior Experience. That’s WISE to you.

The idea behind WISE made too much sense. High school seniors are often stuck in a post-SAT holding pattern, waiting for prom and graduation. So the WISE program encouraged them to set up a project or internship focused on something they were actually interested in. Students had to get a mentor, keep a journal and go out there in the world to do and learn.

Leviatin retired in 1991. The following year, he started WISE Services, a non-profit consulting biz to help other high schools launch their own senior programs. I wrote about it in 1992, around the time the Cold War ended.

Now I’m back on the education beat (mostly covering the grumbling) and WISE is turning 40. So I returned to the WISE room at Woodlands, where Vic picked up in mid-sentence from the last time I saw him. Pushing 75, the guy is a force of nature—smart, deeply committed to education, impatient with bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo and an evangelist for the benefits of treating students like adults and setting them out to find their own muse.

“Do you believe that 17-year-olds still have to raise their hands to go out and use the bathroom” he said. “Why do we do that? The business world wouldn’t do that. These kids are smart. Old people get intimidated because they can text and use these devices while they’re doing other things. But they can. We should treat them like adults. Let them think.”

Check out these numbers. More than 3,500 Woodlands students have gone through WISE. And thanks to WISE Services, more than 45,000 seniors at over 100 high schools in several states have taken on some sort of project connected to a hobby or a course of study or a possible career path. (Sounds like “college and career readiness,” all you education reformers.)

When I visited Woodlands, I met several 17-year-old seniors who are just getting their projects moving. Brianna Warner is looking at costume design. Katrina Chin wants to study why some videos go viral. Taylor Ha plans to take pictures of people at different points in time and ask them how they changed on the inside between photos. Alonzo Louis wants to figure out how to improve the transportation system and traffic flow in White Plains (The citizens of central Westchester are rooting for you, my friend).

Paula Ramirez told me that she’s studying self-hatred awareness. I was intrigued but confused and asked her what she meant. “I want to educate people on the troubles some people go through every day,” she told me. “I want to understand why people hurt themselves by not eating or cutting themselves or when things lead to suicide.”

These young people are impressive. They’re focused and serious because they care about their projects. They’ve been given free rein to prove themselves. At a time when everyone seems demoralized by a move toward data-driven, one-size-fits-all education, the WISE program promotes an individualized experience. It’s in the name. There has got to be room for something like this in our public education system.

I met a fellow named Mandel Holland, who did his WISE project in 1985 about physical fitness and had Leviatin as his mentor. Now he’s back at Woodlands as a social studies teacher, mentoring today’s WISE students. “Students do always realize what a great program this is at first,” he said. “But then they get into it and can’t believe how lucky they are.”

Tyron Postell said he was a “knucklehead” back in his Woodlands days before WISE led to him in 1994 to work with kids at Greenburgh’s Highview Elementary School. He developed an interest in attending college as a result and is now also back at Woodlands focusing on, as he put it, “conflict resolution.” “WISE was life-changing for me,” he said.

WISE or WISE-influenced programs can now be found all across the Lower Hudson Valley. Croton-Harmon, Scarsdale and New Rochelle have had programs for more than 20 years. About a dozen staff members from WISE Services visit their client schools on a regular basis to help each craft the best possible local programs.

These days, Woodlands High begins preparing many freshmen by getting them to think about their interests and possible projects for down the road. In Shehnaz Hirji’s English class, students work in teams to prepare video projects. “We want to expose them to research so they have a foundation for their WISE experience,” she said.

Vic seems to remember every WISE project ever done at Woodlands – the students, their mentors, and where their projects led. He’ll tell you about two young men who kayacked on the Toms River in New Jersey 40 years ago and measured how industrial dumping had polluted the water. It was the first WISE project.

WISE Services is soon bringing on its first full-time executive director, Amy Price, the former head of a program for gifted students. But Vic isn’t going anywhere. He thrives on the long-term involvement of WISE’s earliest supporters, like Numa Rousseve, a former Greenburgh school board president whose children went through WISE.

Rousseve, a thoughtful gentleman I remember well from my days covering Greenburgh, serves on the WISE board and is now a staff member visiting client schools. He told me about a recent visit to the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx and the challenge of getting students to think about education in a very different way. “We don’t want them to do something their teacher might want them to do or something they would feel safe doing in front of their classmates, but what they really want to do,” he said.

Vic smiled. “We really have got something here, don’t we,” he said.