Greenport High School students can now train for professional kitchens without leaving the village. The Greenport Union Free School District launched a Culinary Arts career and technical education program at the high school this fall, a two-year sequence taught in the school's own kitchen classroom by Liam Harley, the teacher the students simply address as Chef.

The program gives Greenport students a local alternative to traveling to BOCES for culinary training, and the district has opened enrollment to students from neighboring districts as well.

Four courses, four certificates

The sequence is built for juniors and seniors, who take four specialized courses across their last four semesters. Year one covers Culinary Practices for Health and Wellness alongside Foundations of Professional Cooking. Year two moves into Fundamentals of Commercial Artisanal Baking and Contemporary Culinary Arts.

Students who complete the program earn four industry-recognized credentials: ServSafe Food Handler; Nutrition, Food and Wellness; Retail Commercial Baking; and Culinary Arts Cook. The coursework also lines up with Suffolk County Community College's culinary arts program, using some of the same textbooks, and graduates can carry college credit with them, entering Suffolk's hospitality track well ahead of their classmates.

District leaders framed the move as a matter of using what the building already had: the space and the teacher were in place, and running the program in Greenport keeps students in their own schedules and their own school day instead of on a bus.

The chef at the front of the room

Harley came to teaching through restaurant kitchens. He grew up in Massapequa and started working in a friend's restaurant at 14, returning every summer and working his way from prep cook to the line. After a six-month program at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan, during which he spent three months working nights at Gramercy Tavern, he cooked and worked as a butcher before changing course, studying English literature and anthropology at Colby College in Maine.

Long Island pulled him back. Harley returned to the East End to run his family's farm in Southold, Bhavana's Blueberries, and began substitute teaching in Greenport. When a home economics position opened in the district, he got certified and took it, and he is now in his third year on the faculty, with the new program putting his kitchen background to full use.

The farm connection is part of the plan for the classes. The program intends to work with the school garden and with local farms, folding the North Fork's growing season into what the students cook, and the district has said it would like the program, as it grows, to eventually support the school kitchen with healthier lunch options.

A small start by design

The first cohort is small, with about five students enrolled, which puts the young cooks at stations with plenty of individual attention in the program's first year. For a village whose Main Street runs on restaurants, the program builds a culinary pipeline that starts in the high school and feeds into Suffolk's hospitality program, pointed at work students can find close to home.

Information on the program is available through Greenport High School and on the district's website.

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