In a church basement with brightly painted walls, Lucy Caraballo grilled 20 or so students about the rocky road to success.
Is college easy? No, said the students. Is it going to be worth it? Yes, they said.
“If you have a test tomorrow, you’re going to go in the nighttime before the test and pray, ‘Dear God, help me pass this test,’” said Caraballo. “Is that going to work?”
Not if you don’t study, said one student. Yes, said another.
“Who said yes?” asked the sharp-eared Caraballo. “Miracles still do happen, but believe me, you have to work a lot.”
This is the CARE After School Program. CARE stands for Children’s After School Resource and Education. It’s operated by the Allison Hill Community Ministry in the Derry Street United Methodist Church in Harrisburg.
Pictured left to right: Idania Pinela, Tito Goigoechea
Here, up to 32 students, elementary through high school, play games, eat hot meals and learn about career paths. They take Spanish lessons, keep journals and write poetry. Each year features a study theme for group learning and independent projects – in recent years, the Civil War, the U.S. Constitution and ancient Egypt. Theme-based field trips have taken students to the National Civil War Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology, Independence Hall.
Derry Street UMC and the defunct Olivet Presbyterian Church, once across the street, collaborated to create a summer enrichment program in 1975. Discovering the need for activities year-round, the two churches created this after-school program, mostly for tutoring and homework help, said Allison Hill Community Ministry Director Bill Jamison. When Jamison came along in 2008, he added the education enrichment aspects, to help students broaden their horizons and build such essential skills as note-taking and public speaking.
Four program alumni from this impoverished neighborhood and surrounding communities are in college now. Current students have their sights set on careers. Fifth-grader Brayan Perez wants to be a lawyer or surgeon. Seventh-grader Joan Weincraub expects to be a biologist. Idiana Pinela, an eighth grader at Harrisburg School District’s Rowland Middle School, will play basketball or be a lawyer.
“They teach us how to respect adults and help us with homework and to work well with other people,” said Pinela.
The $70,000 program is funded by the Carlisle Presbytery, the United Methodist Church’s Susquehanna Conference and a range of individual churches and donors. Whether or not the students go to college, the point is instilling aspirations and a love of learning, said Jamison.
“They’re looking for somebody who will help them learn to discipline themselves and guide them,” he said. “They know the other side. They know what’s bad out in the streets. They know what’s bad in our society.”
The intermingling of older and younger students creates a continuous rotation of role models. Tito Goicoechea, 15, of Steelton, arrived early this day, helping to prepare for the oncoming swarm after schools let out. When he first joined the program, he was a hard-to-handle pre-teen. Now, he says, “I’ve fixed my ways.”
“One or two months after I started coming, a lot of older people started leaving,” he said. “It showed some of us to take charge and watch over everybody else.”
Students work hard to please the program’s adults. Whenever Caraballo orders unruly children into time-out, she asks, “Are you in time-out because I’m mean?”
The answer is always no. Then why are they in timeout?
“Because you love us,” they tell her.
One past student got kicked out and later begged to come back. She became “one of our most outstanding peer leaders ever,” said Jamison.
“It’s built into kids. They’re built to please adults,” he said. “We care, and they care. They care about themselves, and we care about them.”
Twenty kids are on the program’s waiting list, and the program does no recruiting because students come to them. “They don’t want to be out there on the streets,” said Jamison. “They would rather be someplace like this.”
He cited the confident Goicoechea as an ideal example of the focused young person the program helps to shape.
“He’s paying attention to where he’s going,” said Jamison, “and he will get there, carefully.”
