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Sleepy Hollow Middle Schoolers peer through microscopes to witness DNA mutations in fruit flies

October 23, 2022

By Barrett Seaman–

On a bright October morning, the first wave of what by day’s end will be 200 school children from Sleepy Hollow Middle School pours through the door of Regeneron Pharmaceutical Corporation’s DNA Learning Center on the company’s Sleepy Hollow campus just north of Phelps Hospital. Each wave will participate in mini-courses in biology—on cell structure, DNA extraction, mutations and genetic coding.

Their teachers for the day are members of the pharmaceutical giant’s worldwide staff of more than 10,000—each of whom, from chairman Leonard Schleifer on down to the newest bench scientist, will spend one day out of the coming week participating in the company’s Day for Doing Good.

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Some of the activities are more promotional. For example, 60 or so volunteers work to improve natural habitats at the Teatown Lake Reservation, while another 30 carve pumpkins and assemble scarecrows at the Greenburgh Nature Center. At the DNA Learning Center, however, there is more direct corporate self-interest at stake: the seventh and eighth graders from Sleepy Hollow are potential future employees. Lighting a spark of interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in just a few of them might lead to a career in science that will in turn produce a new treatment for cancer of dementia.

One of the permanent classrooms at Regeneron’s DNA Learning Center

Joshua Whitham, the Middle School Principal who has been observing the effects of the Regeneron program over the six years his school has been participating, says he has seen students carry that spark up into high school and beyond. It also spills over into daily classwork. “This pushes our teachers to think outside the box of the classroom,” he says.

Regeneron is not the only large corporation encouraging STEM learning, reflecting a shortfall in qualified employees in the growing fields of technology and medicine. This fall, the STEM Alliance of Westchester is teaming up with AT&T to help bridge the digital divide, using “digital navigators” to develop beginner tech training. Its Digital Pathways program connects low-income residents with the federal government’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) – which provides an up to $30credit toward monthly internet or mobile service (up to $75 per month on qualifying tribal lands) to eligible households. (See: www.allconnect.com/providers/att.)

STEM Alliance President, Margaret Käufer

The work at Regeneron’s DNA Learning Center goes well beyond the Week of Doing Good. “This goes on every day,” says Potoula Stavropoulos, a member of the company’s Social Impact team. “This is what we like to consider a destination for science education. The focus here is hands-on genetics education, learning about DNA, how it works in your body.”

Those who come through here, she says, get to learn from a member of Regeneron’s medical affairs team, following a curriculum developed by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. Regeneron colleagues are teaching the students only during the Day for Doing Good – on a regular basis, educators from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory teach the classes.

The Sleepy Hollow students divide into groups in separate classrooms that provide work benches for 32 people each. One group learns about cell structure, another about the components of DNA by making bracelets with colored beads representing its four bases (A, C, T and G) to spell out a private message in a bracelet they can take with them. Another watches as a member of the team extracts and isolates DNA in a test tube, and a fourth take turns peering through a microscope to identify mutations in fruit fly cells.

Because roughly a third of Sleepy Hollow students come from the village’s Hispanic community, Andrea Calabrese, an ENL (English as a New Language) staffer who co-teaches in biology, translates the scientific jargon into Spanish.

The work of the STEM alliance (thestemalliance.org) goes well beyond developing employment skills. Its K-12 education and enrichment programs benefit not only students but also their families and communities. Its mission is to “bridge systemic gaps to provide equal access to critical science, technology, engineering and math learning resources with the goal of empowering communities, inspiring innovation and creating opportunity for all.” Data show that tech proficiency is associated with greater self-confidence, better health as well as better jobs with higher income.