Managing a room full of rowdy children—all between 9 and 11 years old—on a hot Thursday afternoon may seem like the work of a trained professional, but as Mission Hill After School Program volunteer E. Jordan Taylor ’12 steps into the classroom on the Wentworth Institute of Technology campus, she transforms from student to disciplinarian without missing a beat.

Taylor has been a volunteer with the all-student-run MHASP since her freshman year, and her confidence in directing the restless students shows.

“I need everyone’s eye contact right now,” Taylor announces, raising her right hand. “I’m going to wait until I have 100 percent attention.”

Climbing atop tables and screaming at each other, Taylor’s students refuse to attend to her lesson plan for the day.

One of the students even talks back to Taylor, accusing her of not being “nice” while marching around the classroom with her hand raised in mockery.

“There are days like this, and days when they are complete angels,” Taylor says of her students’ raucous behavior.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Of the Phillips Brooks House Association’s 17 after school programs, MHASP is the oldest and largest, founded in 1983 and currently comprised of 180 volunteers.

The program provides three-and-a-half hours of after school activities and tutoring for 63 elementary and middle school students from two of Boston’s housing developments, Mission Main and Alice Taylor.

Based on the WIT campus, the Mission Hill program is run mainly by students from Harvard and Wellesley, with a few volunteers from other Boston-area colleges.

The program runs four days a week, with college volunteers alternating on the different school days.

“If you don’t come to the program, you just stay at home and play games. If you come to the program, you have fun and do homework like this,” one elementary school-aged Mission Hill participant says, snapping his fingers to indicate how efficiently he could complete work at MHASP.

A large part of Mission Hill’s success and longevity is a result of the large-scale coordination between hundreds of college volunteers and kids from the neighboring communities and the program’s well-established schedule of daily activities.

Each Mission Hill child is paired with a college volunteer who assists them with homework, reads aloud to them, and plays games with them.

MHASP itself is headed by four student directors, each responsible for a different aspect of curriculum planning and program management.