A local elementary school is seeking community support to help reinstate a beloved chess program.
P.S. 174 William Sidney Mount, located at 65-10 Dieterle Crescent, is hosting a GoFundMe to raise $10,000 to cover the expenses of its Chess Club, which taught 100 students how to play chess last year. The funding goal will go towards rehiring chess instructors and expanding the program to younger students at the school.
The program, held in the Rego Park-based elementary school, was previously funded by Sen. Joseph Addabbo Jr.’s office and ran from November 2023 to the end of last year’s school year.
Dr. Hazel-Ann Lewis, principal of P.S. 174, and Ms. Marie Russel, the program’s coordinator, said the Chess Club was overwhelmingly popular amongst students.
For last year’s program, a sign-up sheet with a waitlist was created, and 26 students were chosen per session. Three sessions were held on Friday afternoons during the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade lunch periods.
The selected students would then participate in a 12-week chess program, and once that ended, a new group of students on the waiting list could learn how to play chess.
P.S.174 partnered with Chess NYC, which provided 2 chess instructors to run the sessions and teach students the game’s rules and strategies. “They are wonderful. They come in and work with the children so nicely,” said Russel. “They rotate around the room, helping and problem-solving with the students.” She added that the instructors help reinforce sportsmanship and responsibility among the students.
Russel hopes the fundraiser will help expand the program to younger students interested in chess. “We had a lot of our younger grades, our kindergarten, first through second, were saying, well, what about us? We want to play too. We couldn’t do that because we just didn’t have the funding for it,” she said.
Dr. Lewis said that the chess program has proven to impact the students positively. “One of the chief benefits was the enhancement of critical thinking and problem-solving skills so that students were encouraged to think about several moves ahead,” she said. “So this whole process helps them to develop those critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which is essential to their academics and their everyday life.”
Dr. Lewis added that the program helps students become more analytical and solve problems in and outside the classroom.
Russel echoed Lewis’s views, adding that the chess program aids in developing students’ social-emotional learning and enhances communication in school.
“You do have some students who have a hard time understanding that their actions have a consequence, but by having the chess program, they could think about the steps that might happen and apply them to their everyday life,” Russel said. She added that by applying the transferable skills they learned in chess, the students can work on self-regulating their emotions.
“It just makes them realize that you think before you act, and that… even as adults, we have to remember to think before we act sometimes.”
Dr. Lewis said she hopes the fundraiser gains traction so the school can immediately reinstate the program. Once the fundraiser is completed, the school can resume hiring the Chess NYC instructors and expand the program to younger students.
She said the school’s community feels the loss of the program. “Our school is a beautiful community; there’s lots of positives and lots of things for the students to participate in,” she said. “But during their downtime with lunch, it provides a little more structure to the lunch period, especially in inclement weather. “
The GoFundMe was spearheaded by a P.S. 174 parent who realized the Chess Club’s direct impact on his six-year-old son.
Diego Paixão said his son, Wagner, is a testament to how the chess program has impacted P.S. 174 students. Paixão said that last school year, Wagner would often get in trouble in school and found a positive outlet in the chess program. “ He’s a bright kid, he’s always been, but he gets into trouble at school,” Paixão said. ‘“He ended up in the library, and they were having chess club in the library…and then one day, he’s like, Papa, let’s play chess.”
Paixão said that when he started to play chess with his son, he was impressed with how much he learned. “ I was like, wow, you know this,” Paixão said. “It was something he was interested in, and he wanted to talk about it… then I saw a different side of him that I’d never seen before…It’s like I felt that, wow, this kid learned something.”
Paixão added that the chess club was a good motivator for Wagner.
“It just became a thing that we would talk about, and he’d look forward to, and we would say, you know, you have to do your homework, you have to behave well so that you can go to chess club, he said. “It was something he really looked forward to.”
He said that when the school year rolled around this September, he expected that Wagner would resume playing again later in the year. After learning about the discontinuation of the chess program due to the lack of new funding, Paixão made it his mission to bring it back to P.S. 174. “I saw the benefit, and I thought to myself, you know what, parents need to know that this is not happening. And they need to figure out a way to get their kids back[in the program].”
Paixão said he started the GoFundMe earlier this month and approached the school and parent association about his plan to raise $10,000 for the program. “At first, it sounds like a crazy idea. Like, hey, I need $10,000 so the kids can play chess. You know, when you hear that, it’s difficult to understand the plan and understand what it actually takes,” he said. “Now they’ve been great. I’ve been working with the parents association and the school, and…I’m starting to get the community behind it and the fundraiser organized.”
