Blakely A. Rogers '88 spends her Friday morning classes cutting and pasting construction paper. She is not in a Visual and Environmental Studies class--Rogers works with children's art classes in the Longfellow elementary school, where she has also done math tutoring as part of Harvard's House and Neighborhood Development (HAND) program. She is only one of more than 100 Harvard students who volunteer in the Cambridge Public Schools.

These students work in the schools through two separate Harvard programs: HAND and Phillips Brooks House (PBH). Together, PBH and the Public Service Program--of which HAND is a major component--provide most of the public service opprtunities on campus, says Milbert Shin '87-88, student coordinator of the the Public Service Program, which was started in 1982 with funding from the University.

"The beauty of volunteering is that there are lots of different opportunities," says Mary Louise Piret, bilingual special education teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. She points out that the high school alone offers over 250 courses, and Harvard students help out in a wide variety of them.

Alan Brickman '76, who runs the city-sponsored Cambridge School Volunteers program, goes beyond Rindge to emphasize the scope and variety of the whole city. "Cambridge ranges from prominent families to non-English speaking families--Cambridge is Harvard Square, but it is also [housing projects] Jefferson Park and Rindge Towers," Brickman says. "The trick is to find the appropriate place for the appropriate volunteer."

Brickman says he hopes to place 400 volunteers, including college students and other workers, in the city schools. This number would represent an increase from even the 380 that were placed in the "golden era" of community service in 1974-5, he says. Volunteer involvement has been on the rise since a low of 170 placements in 1981, Brickman says.

"Students are a responsive constituency," he says. "There was a recognition that public education was in trouble--a perception that the Reagan Administration was not concerned with public education," Brickman explains.

Thanks to well-organized programs like HAND and PBH, Harvard has traditionally provided the bulk of the volunteers in the Cambridge public schools, Brickman says. Now, students from Lesley College and MIT comprise an increasingly large piece of the volunteer pie because of Brickman's stepped-up recruiting campaign on those campuses. Unlike Harvard, Lesley, a teachers' college, grants its students academic credit for volunteer work in local schools.

Even without academic credit, tutoring is a very attractive opportunity for many Harvard students. "I like being involved in a non-political way," says former Eliot House HAND Chairman Andy J. Powell '88. "It gives you some perspective on what's going on."

Public service "is addictive," Shin says. "Once volunteers see what's going on, its hard to turn back." And Rogers says, "I just love it. You get a special feeling that you can't get doing anything else--there's no way you can get that feeling from a job."

Last year, Rogers worked on math with Deborah Kershner, a 13-year-old at the Longfellow School. "It was really funny because I'm not a math person at all," says Rogers, who concentrates in Fine Arts.

"Deborah was super-bright," Rogers says, "so bright she wouldn't concentrate." Rogers says she spent weeks trying to establish trust and communication with the eighth-grader. "The hardest thing for me is dealing with someone very different than I am," Rogers says. "You have to know exactly how to work with each person."

At first, Rogers says, there were problems with the relationship. "I'd go in and say, `What did you do in class?' and she'd say, `I don't know.' Then, we would go through the book and do things I know she had heard in class," says Rogers. "That was really frustrating, but then I would bring her brownies, and we would just sit and talk for the first 20 minutes and stay over an extra 15."

"By the end of the year, her grades were getting a littlebetter, and she was so psyched up, which was an amazing change for Deborah," Rogers says.

"It was wonderful. Blakely was just great," says Deborah's mother, Laura Kershner. "Last year, Deborah didn't understand anything about algebra." Laura Kershner added that Deborah has since placed out of algebra and into a geometry class.

Some Harvard tutors have had more difficulty establishing a relationship with their tutees. Michelle K. Jacobs '88 tutored two students through Leverett House HAND but stopped after one seventh-grader regularly missed sessions.