The tide rolling into Coney Island Creek on Friday morning, May 8, 2026, met an army of determined teenagers.
For three hours, students from John Dewey High School traded their classrooms for the Kaiser Park shoreline, pulling plastics, abandoned items, and urban runoff out of the water to rescue the neighborhood’s fragile marine ecosystem.
It’s My Estuary Day is an important day in raising awareness for our NY Waterways.
This event is organized in a collaboration between Partnerships for Parks, New York State Marine Education Association, Billion Oyster Project, The NY Aquarium, John Dewey HS and City Parks Foundation. The community partners and youth leaders involved have been participating in this event for over a decade now.
An estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of water where freshwater from rivers and streams mixes with saltwater from the ocean. This unique blend creates brackish water, forming highly productive ecosystems that act as essential nurseries for marine life and natural buffers against coastal storms.
Coney Island Creek is often cited as one of NYC’s most polluted waterways.
The cleanup highlights an urgent, student-led effort to rescue Coney Island Creek from severe pollution and neglect. By removing hidden rubbish, these high school volunteers demonstrated how direct student action can instantly transform a hazardous public space into a cleaner, safer environment for the entire community.
“We started partnering with a group of like minded enthusiastic environmentalists who wanted to teach children and the local community about the importance of keeping our estuary safe. Most of us live in this area. I myself am a proud south Brooklyn resident and it’s a beautiful spot,” Assistant Principal and event host Ms. Woods said.
Junior Alexander Liang says he joined to clean up Coney Island Creek, motivated by a desire to give back to the community.
While the creek appeared clean from a distance, a closer inspection revealed severe trash accumulation that made the area unsafe for public use.
“From my perspective, the creek was looking clean from afar, when you got closer, the creek’s condition was severely worse than expected,” said Liang. The most physical challenge for volunteers involved hauling heavy bags of collected garbage across the site back to the perimeter fences.
Despite the exhausting labor, Liang felt proud of the group’s immediate ecological impact and hopes the initiative inspires collective action. “The message I would give is we should be a part of the cleanup together as a community.”
Some students would rather make an impact on the environment than sitting and doing traditional classwork for a morning of manual labor along the muddy banks of Coney Island Creek was a welcomed change of pace. “I really wanted to be there and make a difference instead of doing classwork,” explained Senior Kyle Ng, who volunteered on the scene. “And hey, why not? I just go there and make a difference to the community.”
John Dewey High School aimed to transcend the standard community cleanup, transforming the shoreline into a living classroom.
“There were marine scientists present, and they said we want to teach kids about the local environment,” shared Ms. Woods. “We wanted to educate everyone about all of our local resources, so every year it’s not just a beach clean up.”
This scientific focus directly impacted how students connected with their surroundings. Ms. Woods noted a shift in the students’ attitudes, observing that they initially arrived “skittish”, hesitant and visually “grossed out” by the accumulation of debris.
However, after a thorough safety briefing and the distribution of little pickers, the students quickly transitioned into dedicated citizen scientists, gathering data and studying the health of the local estuary.
By the end of the event, the initial discomfort was entirely replaced by a relaxed, enthusiastic atmosphere. Ms. Woods emphasized that witnessing the pollution firsthand ultimately fostered deep empathy among the students, driving home the vital importance of keeping our waterways clean.