Everett’s Delta Neighborhood joins in to give kids activities at school

EVERETT — The 75 or so third-graders at Hawthorne Elementary always look forward to Fridays for their next project.
Through its recently started Delta Kids project, the local neighborhood is gifting art supplies and lessons on everyday life for every third-grade student at Hawthorne.
The kids make things using what’s in the kits from videos produced by neighbors in the neighborhood. Delta neighbors have made three lessons so far, and plan to do 12 overall this school year.
“You should have seen their faces when they got the kits,” Hawthorne third-grade teacher Amy Lee said.
A starter box has scissors, glue, and other art supplies. As the kids do more lessons, they receive kit boxes with additional supplies.
Pamela Hanes scours for the supplies and edits the videos. She’s been able to keep the average cost per kit down to $1.50, which is under $125 to give kits to every single third-grader.
Fall harvest lanterns, with tissue paper and a LED candle in jars from the pantry, were a big, heartwarming hit.
Another project on nature trees had kids collect branches and leaves around their neighborhood to glue to construction paper.
The latest lesson was making a hanging bird feeder. For it, Hanes looked for the 12 most common birds in the area, and put these on flash cards in English and Spanish into the kits.
The class is learning about ecosystems, making it a great match, Lee said.
Neighbors have stepped up. Artist Rosemary Jones will teach a lesson on how to sketch. Musicians and writers Richard and Christa Porter are doing a project telling about the fire department. Molly Deardorff is doing a project on making postcards.
Hanes made sure that for the sketching lesson, every student received a real sketching pencil.
Hanes loves the creativity to making lessons and hopes they spark children’s’ interests. Maybe they’ll turn into a birdwatcher, or want to become a firefighter.
It also fills a gap. Practically every young kid in Delta attends Hawthorne Elementary, and much of the area is multicultural and low-income. Four-fifths of Hawthorne’s students are classified as low-income by state standards.
Lee and other teachers are grateful for the kits. “Even though we have art lessons, it’s very hard to teach without these supplies at home,” she said. Not everyone can afford them.
Plus, it unifies the neighborhood. One idea the group is working on is to “map your neighborhood” to identify local features, Hanes said.
The Delta Neighborhood was also able to get 3,900 masks from the Everett Fire Department to distribute.


Photo courtesy Hawthorne Elementary School

An example of a homemade fall harvest lantern, one of the projects done by Hawthorne kids through the Delta Kids program.


Giving kids stuck at home something to do sealed the idea.
“With the pandemic, we had all of these amazing events for the community planned” that got canceled, like a second year of Shakespeare in the Park, “and we had money leftover so I was trying to think of what we could do,” neighborhood co-chair Mary Fosse said.
The projects are part of Friday social studies class, and the videos are also posted to the Delta Neighborhood Association’s Facebook page. On them, the narrator walks through how to build the project and then shows off the final product.
The lessons matter to Hawthorne’s parents, and to Hawthorne’s kids. Some harvest lanterns got put in bedrooms as a point of pride.
“It means a lot,” Lee said. “It means they’re really thinking about our kids.”
The neighborhood recently applied for a city arts grant with the goals of expanding the kit program to all first-grade students at Hawthorne, and to sustain it next fall.
The Delta Kids program is receptive to people sponsoring kits, too. The kits cost at most $150 to collect supplies for a project. Contact deltaneighborhoodassociation@gmail.com to inquire.