It’s Monday, 3:45 pm, and the regular school day is ending at the MLK Jr. School on Putnam Avenue. Fifteen minutes later, a number of 6th- 8th graders reappear in Room 304 for after-school academic support in math. Typically, at least 10 students attend the homework help sessions that pair local undergrad and grad students with middle-schoolers who are apt to falter in math without the individualized attention.

Managed by CSV, the after-school program began when Principal Gerald Yung and other school administrators collaborated with CSV’s Kasey Appleman around how to provide extra academic support. By February, three weekly after-school sessions were launched, one mostly for math. On one recent Monday, tutors from Simmons, Tufts, Lesley and Harvard were busily checking in with their students before settling down to work.

King Middle-Schoolers get the help they need from their volunteer tutors.

Several months ago Kasey reached out to the Harvard athletic department, with the result being that seven undergrad Golf Team members participate each Monday. Harvard volunteer Kevin says he finds the tutoring an “enriching experience”, and that it puts everything into perspective for him as a college student living in Cambridge. Michael, another student, notes that tutoring is a way of doing weekly community service. He also feels the importance of being a male role model for his male student. Another team member, Seiji, says that it has been satisfying to watch his tutee go from struggling with a math problem to working through the problem and feeling success.

After Monday’s focused academic work that lasted for the good part of an hour, students and volunteers relaxed a bit for an informal icebreaker. Each student/volunteer pair interviewed one another and then introduced the other to the larger group. As the semester moves on, getting to feel more comfortable in the larger group will continue along with other mentoring components to the sessions. After all, who doesn’t welcome a break when we’ve been working so hard?

Watch out, world – CRLS sophomore Ruth Densamo is on a roll and advancing non-stop toward a career in science and engineering! Several of her recent accomplishments should shed some light.

 One of the youngest members of this year’s Science Olympiad team, Ruth met often with Kristine Gorman, her CSV volunteer who also became Ruth’s Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) mentor. She also prepared for the March competition with math and science tutors Tim Coleman, David Bass and Ben Earle. Ruth did well in two events, placing 4th in Circuit Lab and 7th in Write It – Do It, helping the CRLS team to earn an overall 8th place finish (out of 42 teams) in the state competition.

Ruth Densamo and her mentor, Kristine Gorman.

But it doesn’t end there! Because of CSV’s relationship with corporate partners Volpe National Transportation Systems Center and Cambridge Systematics, and particularly with two women scientists, Linda Sharpe and Iris Ortiz, Ruth was asked to apply for a slot at Transportation YOU’s DC Youth Summit. After an intense application process, she was selected for the trip. The Summit enabled Ruth and 25 other girls and their mentors to spend five days in Washington DC. Prior to the trip, Ruth described what she hoped to get from the experience. “I want to meet people who are scientists – my favorite kind of people, because they’re so open-minded about everything.”

 There were so many highlights to the trip! For one, she got to meet Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Plus, she met people who worked in aviation, a potential career path for Ruth. “The best part,” she noted, “was going to TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control Facilities) to see controllers at work, gazing at radar systems and communicating with pilots”. The trip helped her identify possible career paths in science and engineering that she hadn’t considered before, such as air traffic control and transportation accessibility for the disabled. The experience also included a tour of the White House, meet-ups with other senior administration officials and college reps, plus tours of other exciting DC venues. The Summit was part of a larger initiative of the WTS and the Dept. of Transportation.

 Ruth is a “focused, driven, incredibly hard working, and a delightful young woman,” says David Bass, one of her tutors. Although only a sophomore, she has participated in the Harvard Crimson Summer Academy, the CRLS Physics and Engineering Clubs and  science Club for Girls, in addition to the Science Olympiad. Her interests also include the “natural” worlds of the Mystic River and Alewife Reservation, and she was a semi-finalist for the Young Naturalist Award for her essay on Green Darner Dragonflies. Amazingly, Ruth is quite modest about her accomplishments.

 

Ruth Densamo, a CRLS sophomore interested in science and engineering.

CSV is proud to be associated with such a young and dynamic student, and we wish Ruth all the success in the world as she continues down her chosen path!

Check out this Mack Davis Awards CSVinc video of a Netpal mentors and mentee at the ceremony.

Joining the list of notables coming to celebrate and thank this year’s 900+ CSV
volunteers will be Paul Reville, Secretary to the Executive Office of Education in
Massachusetts. Come meet Secretary Reville and hear his words of thanks and
commitment to volunteer programs like CSV that work so tirelessly to enrich the
learning of children in the public schools!

Go here to register for this event.

Sharon McBride has volunteered with CSV for five years, participating in the early literacy program as well as the Writer’s Workshop and Publishing programs with second and third graders.

As a volunteer, Sharon brings her own personal knowledge as a writer, and her love of children’s theater where she spent several years working as a puppeteer. She has a degree in children’s literature and has spent a dozen years in children’s publishing, working with everything from picture books to young adult non-fiction. She also has experience teaching in a special education classroom.

While in the classroom as a tutor, Sharon offers encouragement and support to specific students who the teacher feels need help for a few weeks or months to reinforce daily writing objectives. During Writer’s Workshop, she may “float” from table to table, working with any of the students. Occasionally she reads to the whole class at group time, which Sharon says is “one of my favorite things to do.”

Sharon McBride reading to one of her students.

One common challenge Sharon finds are students who resist writing. She points out that there are as many reasons for this as there are students. One second grader, Andrew, seemed especially unwilling to engage in the writing process. “I can’t spell; I don’t have any ideas,” was Andrew’s usual refrain. Over several months, Sharon developed strategies that helped to reassure him that it was okay if words were not spelled with conventional spellings. Sharon actively and carefully listened to Andrew, especially the subtext of what he was saying. She asked questions to evoke more information and was able to suggest topics that would be personally meaningful to him.

English was not Andrew’s first language, though he spoke and understood it. He often talked about how many different schools he had been to and how many languages he had to deal with in the different communities in which he had lived. For a class poetry writing exercise, Andrew asserted that he had “no ideas,” but when Sharon, responding to his cues, suggested that he could write a poem about his experiences with those many languages, he became excited and wrote a short, simple poem entitled, “I Speak.” After his classroom teacher printed his poem on a poster board and he shared it with the class (and to lots of peer praise), as Sharon says, “this reluctant writer had a moment of success that he clearly savored.”

For Sharon, the work she does with CSV is truly rewarding, especially when working with students like Andrew. She also brings her own experiences as a parent of two lively boys with very different learning styles who went through the Cambridge Public Schools. She has truly been able to impart her many skills and talents to all students.

1) Amy Tung speaking at the CSV Now event. 2) Tung and Lopes-Smith in 2008 3) Tung and Lopes-Smith in 2012 4) Tung with her medal.

Question – How many sophomores in high school could deliver a speech with poise and eloquence in front of several hundreds adults? The answer: Amy Tung could and did, at the recent CSV Now event held in the award-winning atrium of Genzyme, a Sanofi company, in Kendall Square. CSV held the event to honor its special KeyPal program partners – Draper Laboratory, IBM, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and to thank them for their 18 years of extraordinary collaboration and caring for the public school students of Cambridge. Amy, a CRLS sophomore and former KeyPal, was the only student speaker at the celebration. She spoke of her fortune at having been paired with Doreen Lopes-Smith, her IBM KeyPal during sixth grade. She and Doreen exchanged hundreds of e-mails over the year. Together, they worked on several projects: a time-line of Amy’s life, a book review, a math PowerPoint portfolio, and a biography of Doreen. Amy got to go to Doreen’s workplace and see what she did at her job; Doreen visited Amy at the Kennedy-Longfellow School during a school day, along with other KeyPals.

 What a thrill for Doreen to know that her former student, four years later, spoke so highly about her and the program! And just as powerful was Amy’s description of how she would not be who she is today had she not had Doreen as her KeyPal. Amy read part of her 6th grade biography of Doreen, highlighting the strong, positive impact that Doreen and the KeyPal program had on her character development.

Amy’s speech has not been the only highlight of her year so far. She is also a member of the Science Olympiad team that competed in March against student scientists from 41 other Massachusetts high schools. She gained a medal in the Experimental Design event, coming in third, and placed a respectable 5th place in Rocks and Minerals. CSV volunteer scientist Lindsay Hays advised Amy and helped her prepare for the competition.

 As a post-script to the story of Amy and Doreen as KeyPal partners, both student and former KeyPal met for lunch recently to “catch up”. It’s clear that each will stay in the other’s life for a long time to come!

 

Over the years, Susan has had several different experiences as a CSV volunteer. As soon as she retired as an academic publisher in 2005, she was delighted to be able to resume volunteering. Her first assignment was tutoring a second grader from Haiti in reading and writing.

By the end of fifth grade, her amazingly bright tutee, Leah, had aced the MCAS, tied for third place in a city-wide poetry competition in which there were nearly 700 entries, and was doing sixth grade exercises with ease. Leah had also mastered some of the mysterious features of Susan’s cell phone, like the camera, and succeeded in explaining them to Susan.

Along the way, Susan picked up other “assignments,” and more recently has worked as a coach in a first and second grade Writers’ Workshop and as a K-2 “publisher.” The kids adore this activity, she reports. Susan once ran into one of her student authors, accompanied by his parents, on the street. To her amusement, the student introduced Susan as “my publisher!”

Susan Milmoe (left) at the CSV Now! Event. Susan was an ambassador for the CSV Publishing Program with fellow volunteer, Nancy Spence (right). They created a wonderful display of the published stories for grades K-2.  Susan publishes at the Martin Luther King School. Nancy leads the publishing at the Graham and Parks School.

Three lasting legacies of the program for Susan are her deepening awareness of children's incredible resilience and ability to learn; an ongoing respect for the hard work teachers have to do (and that her Martin L. King Jr. School teachers do so well); and her appreciation of other cultures. In each of her classes, up to one-third of the students speak another language at home. Often no two students in class speak the same language. There is great variety - Somali, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Mandarin, and others. The parents of some children are immigrants (not infrequently refugees); some are graduate students in the Boston area who will return to their countries.  She is amazed every year by the progress the students are able to make.

Susan loves children, so her engagement with them in school brings great joy. To acknowledge her service to young elementary students over the past eight years, CSV recently presented Susan with a Mack Davis Award and looks forward to her continued involvement as a volunteer.

Thank you notes to Susan from the writers.

(From L to R): Anya Alexandra Bear (MIT KeyPal Site Coordinator); PaulParravano (MIT Co-Director of Government and Community Relations); Jennifer Fries (CSV Executive Director); Ellen Avery (Draper Lab KeyPal Site Coordinator); Gretchen MacDougall (IBM KeyPal Site Coordinator); and Faraneh Serino (IBM KeyPal Site Coordinator).

Cambridge School Volunteers (CSV) celebrated its commitment to the academic success of Cambridge Public School students at a special event, CSV Now, on March 15 at Genzyme, a Sanofi Company, in Kendall Square.

After welcoming remarks by Meghan Dulac (Genzyme Community Relations Specialist and CSV Board member) and Jennifer Fries (CSV Executive Director), Amy Domini, CEO and founder of Domini Social Investments, shared her views on the importance of volunteerism and public education. CRLS sophomore Amy Tung, who had participated in KeyPals many years before, spoke about the program’s positive impact on her academic life. Paul Parravano, MIT’s Co-Director of Government and Community Relations shared highlights of eighteen years of the program. And finally, CPSD Superintendent Jeffrey Young spoke about the difference that a mentor can make in a child’s life.

CSV’s event honored its special KeyPal program partners: Draper Laboratory, IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the past seventeen years, this remarkable program has matched fifth and sixth graders from the Kennedy-Longfellow School with employees from Draper, MIT, and IBM for a year-long exchange of e-mails focusing on e-mentoring, technology, writing and awareness of career options. Students and mentors meet face-to-face four times during the school year as well, both at the school and the workplace.

CSV has played a pivotal role in its mission to support the academic and personal success of Cambridge public school students, with more than 25,000 volunteers participating in a variety of elementary and high school programs, and logging in more than 1.5 million hours of volunteer time during its 46-year history. It is estimated that close to 70 percent of all public school students have been impacted by a CSV volunteer.

Monies raised at the event will continue to support CSV’s many successful programs as well as help to develop new ones. For more information about CSV, go to www.csvinc.org.

On March 15, forty-nine eager sixth graders from the Peabody School took part in the annual Math Breakfast, sponsored by their NetPal mentors from Cambridge Systematics (CS) and Grace Construction Products. Managed by Cambridge School Volunteers (CSV) and now in its thirteenth year, the NetPal program pairs each Peabody sixth grader with an employee from CS or Grace for a year of e-mail exchanges and on-site mentoring focused on language arts, science and math. It also serves to bring career awareness to the Cambridge middle schoolers. Grace hosted the breakfast at their Alewife office this year.

Following their arrival at Grace, students were treated to breakfast and animated conversation with their NetPals. This was the third face-to-face meeting of the adult and student pairs. PowerPoint presentations by three CS and Grace employees highlighted the field trip. Each focused on how math is used in everyday life. The presentations included: using math to budget time for planning one’s day after school (homework, snowboarding, bedtime); figuring out complex recipe directions when doubling them from simple ones; and using the survey method to determine the fastest and most economical way to travel by car vs. public transportation.

The final get-together of the school year will be in May, when NetPals go to the Peabody School for the opportunity to see the students’ Science Fair projects. This event is a favorite for both students and adult mentors, too.