Neal Bluel joined the Metro staff this year. From the start, his job didn’t look like that of the average high school science teacher, but that’s what he was looking for. A transplant from Missouri who arrived in Columbus when his wife took a job managing the Waterman Dairy Farm, he spent time researching places he might want to teach, and a couple of years teaching at a local private school before arriving at Metro.

Bluel doesn’t work in a traditional lab. In his first trimester on staff, he didn’t spend much time in the school itself. Instead, he had a classroom at Franklin Park Conservatory, where the biomes and gardens became the laboratory for his third-year students – kids who have already passed or are close to passing the “gateway.” They did things like test water quality and soil samples and researched pest management.

“We take full advantage of Franklin Park,” says Bluel. “We try to get outside as much as possible, bring in the staff to our classroom to talk to the students about what they do.”

And while that certainly taught students a great deal about botany and environmental science, it also gave the conservatory data that it can use when it comes to making decisions about things like the fertilizer it should buy. In return for allowing Metro to use classroom space, it received thousands of dollars worth of water quality testing for free.

“When schools go out and look in the community for partnerships, they often approach it with a posture of ‘ what are you going to do for me?’” says Bluel. But the internships, independent research projects and off-site classes Metro students engage in were designed differently from the outset. “The general idea is that our students work for the facility they are housed in.”

With each year Metro has added a new class of students, the school has also added necessary staff.  That means the character changes a little every fall, and Bluel didn’t find it easy to fit in at first.

“I was intimidated by the teachers that I met. It was hard for me to figure out my place for the first month,” he says. He describes the small staff –  positively– as one with “multiple dynamic personalities.”

Bluel also expected that integrating his subject and collaborating with other teachers would be easier, but time constraints on core curriculum teachers, who have more students in their classrooms than he does, have made that more difficult.

It also requires a different way of thinking.

“When you integrate, you have to be willing to not be right, to share your info and to let go of barriers that competition – for student interest, money, time or space – might raise,” he says.

Some of his ideas were shrugged off by colleagues as “already tried,” in spite of the school’s newness, but he understood that some of that resistance stemmed from its rapid growth – at Metro, everyone is always working to adapt.

Still, he has forged ahead with new ideas, building partnerships with various departments at OSU, using them to help build the skills for independent study and undertaking a large-scale project called Growing America that will give students direct, hands-on experience with agriculture from the cultivation of food to its local marketing.