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• 1 2018-04-15T00:30:12-04:00 What is MHASP? 1 plain 2018-04-23T20:31:34-04:00

  A Community-Oriented Location

  Mission Hill After School Program (MHASP) is a Phillips Brooks House program that focuses on helping elementary, middle, and high school-aged students who live in the Mission Hill area. Founded in 1983, MHASP is unique in that it does not serve children from specific schools, but rather from specific housing developments within a neighborhood. Children who attend MHASP live in either the Alice Taylor or Mission Main buildings, which are affordable housing developments for people and families in the Boston area. Program is held in the center Mission Main building, which is a convenient walk from all students who are eligible to attend program, and volunteers from Harvard, Wellesley, and Northeastern pick up and drop off the children at their homes, making it safe and convenient for children, volunteers, and families. 
  
  

  The Jobs

  There are three main jobs at MHASP, and these brief descriptions will help to understand the rest of this chapter. 
  Counselor: Counselors work one-on-one with the students, and often work closest and the most directly with the students. They are in charge of making sure their child completes homework, behaves appropriately, and safely gets to and from program. 
  Coordinator: Coordinators oversee each individual classroom for each color group. Typically, each color group has two coordinators per color group each day, and each coordinator attends program twice a week. Besides overseeing classrooms, Coordinators also plan curriculum for each day, and meet with parents to discuss their child's progress, needs, and goals for the year.
  Director: A director oversees all activities and groups, and serves as a "link" to other groups and to families. Directors will go in and out of color group classrooms, checking in and being where needed. Certain directors are "links" for certain color groups (i.e. someone is a "red group link") and help connect groups and make sure operations run smoothly. Additionally, both directors and coordinators are responsible for driving the vans of volunteers to and from program.
   

  The Breakdown

  Mission Hill serves school children ages five to 17, and each student is sorted into different "color" groups based on age: red is the youngest, then green, orange, blue, and finally teen. Each group has their own classroom, and operates (for the most part) independent of the other groups. With the exception of teen group, the other color groups, while independently operating, follow a very similar approach, design, and layout for each day. For example, each color group emphasizes partnership-based learning, so they will typically assign one counselor to one student to work closely for the whole semester. Counselors get to know their specific child on a very close basis, and help to foster a knowing relationship. A typical day consists of counselors picking up students from either their houses, bus stops, or sometimes schools, and then coming to program, which is split into two parts: homework and curriculum. Homework time is straightforward: counselors help children with any work they were assigned during the day (often math worksheets or book assignments). If a student does not have homework, they are still encouraged to do "academic" related work, like a math worksheet provided by program, or reading with a counselor. The second half of the day (curriculum) is when students come together for a lesson (usually given by a coordinator) and group activity. These activities often build on something classroom/academic-related, and expand it to a fun activity that encourages students to think about possible activities outside of the classroom (like singing, dancing, drawing, reading for pleasure, playing sports, etc.). Some examples of curriculum include learning about yoga through editation and stretching, learning about physics by building structures out of macaroni and marshmallows, and learning to read better by looking at books and reading words during karaoke. After curriculum, counselors and coordinators split up with small groups of students and drop them at their homes. PBHA provides vans to take the volunteers to and from campus (driven by coordinators and directors).