Civic Spotlight

Discovery Club extends the joy of learning

This page honors local organizations that help the community and its residents improve their lives. Each quarter a new organization will be honored.

This quarter Haverhill Bank honors: Discovery Club

When the last school bell rings, that’s usually the signal for schoolchildren to pack up their books and head home. But for many students in Haverhill, that bell marks the start of a different kind of learning.

Every day, 450 Haverhill students participating in the Discovery Club enrichment program are in school, learning and exploring new interests until 5 p.m. Discovery Club is a place where children explore the joys of learning through doing. They also get nourishing snacks and after school help with homework.

“I love being here with my friends,” said Raven Rivera, 11, a fifth grader at Silver Hill School. She was taking an art class and learning about digital photography under the guidance of Susan Bliss, an art instructor.

The children who take part are happy to be at school from morning until later afternoon. Parents pay a fee. But if the child qualifies for free lunch, no tuition is charged.

Raven Rivera, 11, and Jalexis Alverado, 10, work with Susan Blinn, an art teacher, on putting together a collage in the Discovery Club after school program at Silver Hill School.

“I ty to keep the tuition as low as possible,” said Discovery Club Director Tina Fuller, one of the program’s founders.

Here, instructors put a fun twist on teaching subjects like math by using materials like pretzels and marshmallows. There are also cooking lessons, dance classes, rocketry and even the opportunity to join Girl Scouts.

For Cheryl Kelly, a math specialist teacher at Silver Hill School, the Discovery Club is a unique opportunity to work on the math lessons she teaches during the day.

“I try to support what I taught in the classroom that day. But, in Discovery Club, we can make it more fun by using things like food to teach,” she said.

For a geometry lesson, Kelly had students use marshmallows and pretzels to create two-dimensional shapes.

Teachers like Kelly are part of what makes the Discovery Club a different kind of after-school program.

Students learn from the experts, in small group settings. This makes learning fun and helps children improve their reading and math skills because of the extra help they receive. There are 100 teachers and paraprofessionals working in the Discovery Club program.

Before children can get to the fun part of Discovery Club, every child is expected to work on homework for about 45 minutes. Then, healthy snacks are served. The snacks Discovery Club can serve are selected under specific nutritional guidelines, because of a concern about children and obesity. Some 47 percent of Haverhill school children are considered obese under federal guidelines.

Exploring the community with educational field trips is another part of the Discovery Club experience. Children take field trips to wonderful places like Smolak Farm in North Andover to learn hands on about how things grow.

Damien DeBarge, 12, enjoys learning math by making shapes out of pretzels and marshmallows. Charlie Rodriguez, 9, is also having fun in the Discovery Club after school program at Silver Hill School.

The fun continues with a summer enrichment program, which will serve 270 students from July 9 through Aug. 2. Some of the programs offered this summer include horticulture and gardening, fishing and aquatic ecosystem, television production and the physics of kite flying.

Discovery Club is a grant-funded program. Currently, the program receives $662,000 from the 21st Century Community Learning grant, which is down from a high of $755,000. When Discovery Club started in 2000, it began with an $85,000 state After School And Out-Of-School Time grant.

Because of a shrinking availability of grant money, corporate donors like Haverhill Bank are very important to the success of the program.

“Discovery Club is a great program. It helps keep children busy and safe after school. And, the extra academic help they receive is an added benefit,” said Thomas R. Faulkner, president of the Haverhill Bank. “That is why Haverhill Bank was happy to contribute.”
At its heart, Haverhill Bank is above all a community bank, which is why the bank is happy to support Discovery Club, Faulkner said.