Phillips Brooks House programs such as Keylatch, One to One and Mission Hill target inner-city children who need additional support in tutoring or peer counseling. Undergraduate volunteers try to provide the children with...

Rasheedah, a fourth grader at Blackstone Square Community School in Boston, says she attends the Keylatch program sponsored by Phillips Brooks House, because it provides her with after school tutoring while her mother is away from home.

"I need help with my homework while my mom's at work," she says. "When there's not Keylatch, she says try first and then she'll help you."

Rasheedah says she often has trouble completing her school work when she has only her mother to help her.

The Keylatch program provides Rasheedah and other Blackstone children left alone in the afternoon while their parents work with the extra help they need to succeed in school, according to Keylatch member Phillip M. Grant '94.

Undergraduate Keylatch volunteers not only help children with their homework but also form special friendships with their students, Grant says. Friendships form during group play sessions after the children have completed their homework and during weekend outings.

The children say they enjoy these play times as much as they benefit from the attention to their homework.

A third-grade boy says he attended Keylatch as much for the activities offered as for the help with school work.

"It's the best," he says. "At the end of the year, you get to go out of state. Last year we went to Ashland, New Hampshire, to a park, and the year before that we got to go to Washington, D.C."

Volunteers say that the Keylatch program addresses an important need among families by attempting to provide providing children with extra help to stay in school.

A USA Today survey recently ranked Massachusetts 34th in national dropout rates with approximately 23 percent of students leaving high school before graduation. A 1989 study by the American Association of School Administrators defines an at risk student as one who is "one or more years behind their age group in the number of credits attained or basic skills levels."

Harvard students say they benefit from the program as much as the kids. Laura E. Meeks '96, who joined Keylatch because she had attended a PBH open house, says she admires the children because of their spontaneity.

"They'll just get up and start singing and dancing in front of everybody. I'm surprised they have that sort of confidence at their age," she says.

Meeks supervises the fourth and fifth grade Keylatch children.

On a typical day, Meeks divides her time between coaching six fourth graders through a lesson in estimation and refereeing a hectic game of "Dictionary" in which the children attempted to guess the true meaning of a difficult word.