IYRS School of Technology & Trades in Newport, RI is a premier non-profit, post-secondary marine trades and modern manufacturing school offering 4 ACCSC-accredited experiential learning programs on a 3-acre harborfront campus. Building with our hands is the essence of creativity, productivity, human spirit, and even community—as our knowledge, passion and our creations are passed along through generations. Enter IYRS, a school founded initially to reinvigorate and teach these skills in the world of wooden boatbuilding and restoration. Along the way, those traditional and cutting edge skills, and the hands-on way IYRS teaches them, have helped IYRS develop a whole new experiential education model—a model that prepares aspiring technicians, designers, and craftspeople to work with their hands to help themselves, their families, and our collective world. That educational model is this: students immersed both body and spirit, with a team equally dedicated, in a condensed timeframe, to transform materials and systems into useful, lasting things, and in so doing transform their own lives and careers. When we build with our hands, immersed with others in the task, we become attuned to the importance of all that we do. At IYRS, students learn to make, restore and maintain with a heightened sense of purpose and craft. In the process, they build successful careers and more meaningful lives, satisfied and inspired in the knowledge that they have the power to build almost anything.
