Derryfield School

The derryfield school, breakthrough manchester's host for the past 33 years, focused on the core value of family in 2023-24 and that was carried through the summer by breakthrough manchester. With 88 students and 24 teaching fellows, our community bonded like family as we celebrated breakthrough's 33rd summer. With a theme of "under the sea", we all dove into teaching and learning, embracing new experiences together. Summer highlights included: learning about body systems and dissecting real animal hearts in biology, learning about the elements and performing labs testing various solutions in chemistry, and applying newton's laws to create functional paper roller coasters for marbles in physics inspiring literature discussions around reading the other wes moore, raisin in the sun, the arrival, and farewell to manzanar - making connections with history and students' worlds writing classes empowered students to express themselves and what they believe in, through persuasive, argumentative, and personal narrative essays math - algebra and geometry, word problems, and graphs - with creative twists like chalking number lines on the macadam and jumping along the line to solve problemsand that's only what happened in the mornings! Afternoons were filled with: college fairs to learn about the colleges attended by our 24 creative, engaging teaching fellows career fairs start students thinking about future dreams and the paths to get them there service and gratitude: our students made over 171 cards and bracelets to brighten the days of children in local hospitals! Students climbed mountains, took a ferry to visit an island off the coast of nh, explored local colleges and museums in new hampshire and boston - and so much more!over breakfast on the final day of summer, every 7th grader, even those who were nervous and a little shy on the first day, stood up and spoke in a loud voice to all 120 of us to answer the question of the day, "what was your favorite summer activity at breakthrough?" the boston field trip - visiting colleges, riding trains, and exploring museums was a top choice, as well as olympics day - competing in jeopardy on college teams, building paper boats to float, or passing soapy watermelons! Btm packs a full school year of activities into our 6-week summer program!to keep in touch with our students and continue to support their educational pathways, breakthrough provides a school year program of 5 super saturdays. Partnering with derryfield and other local high schools, we recruited 15 high school students to serve as teachers and mentors for 67 middle school students. Themes for the saturdays included: study skills, exploring media: art and film, and focus on wellness and sports, including pickleball and floor hockey! In february an extra stem saturday was led by the derryfield robotics team. During this optional additional saturday, students built robots with legos and enjoyed a friendly competition! The final super saturday brought us all to the manchester-boston regional airport where our students learned about the world of aviation by exploring various careers in airport management and operations.breakthrough has remained financially stable through the efforts of our small but mighty year-round staff led by executive director deb mcloud, program director caroline wilson, and director of philanthropy alice handwerk. Through alice's hard work, strategy, and planning, breakthrough exceeded its fundraising goal and kept close to budget despite increasing expenses, particularly in providing lunch and transportation for our students.as we strive to keep our students on their paths to college, we continue to find gaps in their learning from the covid-19 years. Breakthrough is more important than ever for its work to address those gaps and provide academic, emotional, and social support. We are grateful for the generosity of many foundations, corporations, and individuals in our community who make breakthrough happen - especially the derryfield school for its myriad avenues of in-kind support for breakthrough.