By Julie Shapiro
The 334 kids who poured into the Grace Church School’s gym weekday mornings in July looked ready for summer camp.
They wore bright shorts and T-shirts, toted water bottles and lunchboxes and bid their parents hasty goodbyes. Some battled each other with Transformers action figures, while others found their friends and moonwalked to the Michael Jackson music blasting over the sound system.
Sitting on the bleachers off to the side one morning, Wendy Reynoso, the woman responsible for bringing the freewheeling elementary schoolers together, watched them with a smile on her face.
“It’s very rare that kids are allowed free play like this,” she said. “There’s going to be so much structure the rest of the day, so it’s good to let them let their hair down.”
Reynoso is executive director of the GO Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping Lower Manhattan children who have fallen behind academically. An hour after Reynoso watched the children play, they were sitting in classrooms grouped by ability level and focused on the one skill they most needed to learn this summer.
In Michael Parrish’s classroom on that muggy July morning, 12 soon-to-be fourth graders were getting help with reading comprehension. Parrish turned a lesson on dictionaries into a game, with the children racing each other to find one of the day’s vocabulary words.
As they located “cottage” or “hammock” or “steep” in illustrated dictionaries, the children shot up their hands, often leaping out of their chairs in excitement. One boy abandoned his seat altogether, saying he preferred to stand. As more and more children found the word, the room echoed with calls of, “I got it!”
Wendy Reynoso, the Go Project’s executive director, with some Go Project scholars during this summer’s session.
“GO Project is important because it gives kids a chance to feel good about learning,” Parrish said after the class. Unlike during the school year, when GO Project children may be near the bottom of their public school classes, during the summer they are with others on their level. Looking up words in a dictionary, for example, is a skill most children master in third grade, and the GO Project kids may feel embarrassed if they enter fourth grade without knowing how to do it, Parrish said.
“It’s important to love to learn,” said Parrish, 35, who teaches third grade general education at P.S. 89, in Tribeca, during the school year. “If you’re feeling like you can’t do something, you’re going to end up not liking it.”
GO Project’s major program is the five-week summer school, which includes academics, learning specialists and electives, such as drama, music and gym. The elementary students generally start the program after kindergarten, coming from more than 30 Manhattan public schools below 14th St. More than 80 percent receive a free or reduced-price lunch, and about half require special-education services for difficulties such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. All are performing below grade level and are identified by their schools as needing extra help.
The students selected for GO Project continue with the program through the school year, attending a half-day Saturday session and receiving tutoring and social services. GO Project uses donated space in independent schools, including Grace Church School.
By the time GO Project kids reach third, fourth and fifth grade and take state tests, they out-perform the School District 1 average by several percentage points, with 69 percent of GO Project students passing the English test and 88 percent passing math in 2008.
GO Project students with learning disabilities also do well, with 61 percent passing the English test, compared to the 32 percent average for learning-disabled students in the district in 2008.
Reynoso said the summer program is particularly important because low-income students can lose as much as three months of learning during the 10-week vacation. Instead, GO Project kids gain about three months of learning, ideally catching up with their peers.
This year marked Reynoso’s seventh at the GO Project, and her third as executive director. The program was founded 41 years ago by two Grace Church parents and has grown rapidly in the last five years, more than doubling in size.
In recognition of Reynoso’s work, Trinity Church named her as one of its two Trinity Transformational Fellows earlier this year. The fellowship includes a six-week sabbatical and $25,000, which Reynoso will use this winter to travel around the country learning about best practices in student assessments.
“It’s great to know that somebody’s watching,” Reynoso, 35, said of being anonymously nominated for the award. “Sometimes you just need a sign. … The rewards are not instant. They’re just not.”
Reynoso grew up in Lynn, Mass., where she attended after-school and social-service programs, including Head Start and Upward Bound, which helps low-income high school students prepare for college. She attended Oberlin College and has received master’s degrees in sociology of education and elementary education from Columbia University Teachers College, along with a certificate in educational administration from the Steinhardt School of Education.
Reyonoso’s latest challenge has been the economic downturn, which hit GO Project hard, with foundations reducing grants and some private donors unable to give. GO Project’s nominal fee of $100 per child per year covers only 1 percent of the expenses.
Reynoso had hoped to expand GO Project to 400 students this year, but instead she struggled to maintain the same services that were offered last year and had to cut Fridays down to half days during the summer program.
But she kept the classes small — GO Project has one teacher for every six students — and she is filling gaps with volunteers, some of whom are former GO Project students. The volunteers help keep the easily distractible students on task and prevent students who need extra attention from disturbing the class.
The GO Project teachers focus on encouragement, since their students get enough criticism during the school year. Whenever Parrish bent down to help students, he would begin by telling them what they had done correctly — for example, that a small, dark-haired boy had gotten four of the five letters right when writing “world.”
When the boy identified the letter he was missing — it was the “L” — Parrish boomed, “Way to go, super-speller!” and the boy beamed with pride.
Nowhere is the can-do attitude more evident than at Harambee, the 20-minute pep rally that starts every day of the summer program. Harambee means “coming together” in Swahili, and that’s just what GO Project’s kids, teachers and volunteers do: They dance to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” and chant call-and-response style to Nas’s “I Can.”
No one is forced to participate, but five minutes in, nearly everyone is on their feet clapping and jumping around. Even a young Asian girl who had complained to Reynoso of a “tummy ache” a few minutes earlier was up and dancing.
As Reynoso watched, she said that the children’s enthusiasm was one of the most important parts of GO Project.
“It’s about connecting positive memories to schooling, letting them know there are positive feelings about school,” Reynoso said. “You just hope it continues to sustain itself.”
