Tall Ship Semester for Girls – Changing Lives at Sea Under Sail

Tall Ship Education Academy in San Francisco runs an amazing program called Tall Ship Semester for Girls. Here’s a great video about this powerful life changing experience.

From the July 2007 issue of San Francisco magazine:

Way to get kids sailing in the right direction
Future classic: Even better than getting away for an afternoon is sailing away for weeks on end. And what’s more worthy of escaping from than a difficult female adolescence? The San Francisco State University–accredited Tall Ship Education Academy takes about 15 disadvantaged high school girls from San Francisco and Oakland sailing for six weeks in the Caribbean during the school year and along the California coast for six weeks during the summer. Not running into a reef becomes an algebra lesson, and interviewing native people on remote islands becomes a history class. This out-of-the-classroom learning re-engages students who’ve lost interest in traditional education and gives them a reinvigorated sense of who they are and where they want to go in life.

Check out their 2006 voyage track and log and definitely read their trainee newsletter, The Bitter End, to get a good idea about how this incredible program changes young women’s lives.

In a world where media images of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton bombard us everyday, we need more programs like Tall Ship Education Academy’s Tall Ship Semester for Girls which provide experiences that build self efficacy, confidence and leadership skills in young women.

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