Some Stark County high school students travel a relatively easy road to college. Ben Graeff, Jackson High School graduate, feels that he was one such student. His academic work and his abilities on the football field gained him admission to Harvard College, where he is earning a degree in economics while playing varsity football in the Ivy League.

So what do you suppose that a student like Ben does with his good fortune? He has turned it into good fortune for others. Once again this summer, he is working with the Cambridge Youth Enrichment Program (CYEP) at Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House Association. The association organizes and directs Harvard students who are interested in community service in Cambridge, Mass., which is home to Harvard and across the Charles River Basin from Boston.

Jackson High School graduate and Harvard College junior Ben Graeff led these boys, Haitian Americans, Ethiopian Americans and Tibetan Americans, in last summer’s Cambridge Youth Enrichment Program in Cambridge, Mass., Harvard’s home. Ben will be one of the student leaders of the program this summer in Cambridge

The Cambridge Youth Enrichment Program runs for seven weeks during the summer, five days a week. It is an academic summer camp for 150 children aged 6 to 13 who live in three Cambridge housing projects. The parents of these children are mostly immigrants, many from Haiti or Tibet, who have no other summer option for their children as the parents work and then go to school in the evenings, trying to earn and learn their way in their new country.

‘Summer Learning Loss”

The CYEP is designed to combat “summer learning loss” that otherwise causes teachers in the fall to spend a good part of the year re-teaching material learned during the previous school year but lost during the summer for lack of educational reinforcement.

Each camp counselor teaches 30 minutes of mathematics and 30 minutes of literacy each morning during a three-hour classroom session, following established academic standards for the children’s school grade level. The counselors also offer academic enrichment in a field of their own interest. Since as lot of Ben’s time is spent preparing for and participating in the varsity football program, he offers his class summer enrichment within health, athletics and nutrition. For instance, the mathematics time could be extended by having his students calculate the number of calories burned while playing basketball, he said. Ben also will use the historic city of Boston to teach American history to these newcomers to the United States.

So, what drew this Jackson Township boy to the kind of work he does for Cambridge children? “I already thought that I had lived the life of luxury, I did not really face any hardships. I was attending the best college in the world,” Ben said. And so he felt he owed something to people who had less than he had.

Thanks to a Broken Leg

He will be one of the directors of the Cambridge Youth Enrichment Program this summer, thanks to a broken leg. After two years of practice and training on the Harvard football team, Ben finally made the starting lineup as a defensive end last fall at the start of his junior year. Through three quarters of the first game against Holy Cross, he had four tackles, one tackle for loss. And then an offensive tackle from Holy Cross fell on him, and he broke his leg. He was out for the rest of the season.

He did not lose a year of eligibility and will be able to play two more seasons for Harvard. If this summer were his last at Harvard, he probably would not be able to afford to perform his service work through the Cambridge Youth Enrichment Program. He would more likely be pursuing a career-building internship in business or finance.

That career internship can be postponed until the summer of 2011, and the Phillips Brooks House — not to mention the immigrant children of Cambridge — can occupy his time and talents this summer.

Several months after the injury, Ben can look back at his broken leg as “a kind of a blessing.”