Recently, Luis Cruz worked inside Woodlawn Cemetery’s workshop at East 233rd Street to re-attach an angel’s head that had fallen off a 19th century monument years earlier.

Later, students from Bronx International High School in the South Bronx searched the snow-covered grounds for a missing piece of that angel’s wing after failing to locate it behind the shop’s somewhat creepy pile of broken faces, arms and other stone extremities.

The students are part of the Woodlawn Preservation Training Program, which has been working since the summer to restore monuments on the 400-acre landmark cemetery that would otherwise have gone unrepaired. “We didn’t have anyone on staff trained to do this,” said Susan Olsen, the cemetery’s historian. “Now we can respond to damage and start to catch up.”

With 150,000 monuments in the historic cemetery that was founded in 1863, Olsen said preservation is a “never-ending job.”

Cruz, 20, is one of three apprentices selected from a pool of 12 interns that worked in the cemetery over the summer.

“We weren’t really sure what we could expect out of the kids, or how much they were going to learn. They did great,” said Resident Craftsman Robert Cappiello, who has been training the students in the program.

The students learned how to clean different kinds of cemetery stone, re-point and assess damage, and were certified in scaffolding and OSHA so they can work on other projects. Four of the interns not selected as apprentices are already working in the field.

“This is teaching me to take care, go really slow, look around and see everything,” said Cruz, an engineering student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. “

Cruz said his favorite project has been a boat-shaped monument that commemorates Isidor Straus, who died when the Titanic sank.

The interns’ main project over the summer was restoring the Gracie monument, which commemorates the shipping and merchant family that built what is now Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official home, and is one of the most visited sites at Woodlawn.

Olsen said she was “compelled” to pick a high-profile monument, and said Gracie was selected because it’s “very basic” and does not have a family or endowment to care for it.

Beyond the work on individual monuments, the cemetery hopes that working on the final resting places will spark students’ interest in preserving the historic cemetery, and by extension, the borough’s history, and training young people to meet the demand for skilled workers.

“There aren’t enough people trained to do this work, and there are jobs out there,” Olsen said. “Does the Bronx have a big preservation movement? No we don’t. Are we working on it? Yes we are.”

The program is expected to last for two years, and has already received $600,000 in funding.