Letters and Roblox: High Schoolers Connect With Students at Keys

Recently, Keys 2 Success (K2S) teamed up with Union County Vocational-Technical School’s (UCVTS) Newspaper Club to organize a pen pal program between the high schoolers and Keys 2 Success’ students. Newspaper Club students were assigned a K2S student and they wrote an introductory letter along with some questions to get to know their K2S pen pal better. Then, the letters were sent (digitally) to K2S, and after the K2S students read their letters, they wrote and sent letters back to UCVTS.

“The program gave students from both UCVTS and Newark alike an opportunity to forge new connections in a time that presented it as a rarity,” says Kenna Srivastava, organizer of the program. Kenna, both an editor for the school paper and a graduating senior at Union County Magnet High School, went on to say: “Having been heavily involved in Newspaper Club and knowing many of the Newark students from my time volunteering with them during previous summers, it was nice to see how letters could bridge communities, especially during these unprecedented times.”

After exchanging letters, K2S held a virtual game day in which UCVTS students were able to join breakout rooms and play online games with K2S students.

The event was extremely successful, as several UCVTS students expressed their excitement to get letters back from their pen pals. “It’s fun to write letters in a world where everything has become more online. If I were younger, I would have loved to have an older pen pal,” explained Alondra Martinez, a UCVTS student who participated in the program.

The project aimed to allow the younger K2S students not only to meet with older students, but to practice their social skills in a seemingly dying form of communication (letter-writing), connect with new people during the pandemic, and offer younger students an outlet in writing. Furthermore, it gave UCVTS students a fun way to volunteer and give back to a community that they might not be familiar with while also learning some things about a new person. “I was extremely impressed by the interest we got in this program,” Dr. Jee-Hoon Krska, founder of K2S expressed. “This has now become an official program between UCVTS and K2S, and ...this program has inspired other programs in which we use writing as a medium to connect with different groups, and I’m looking forward to growing these into sizable projects in the future.”

Keys 2 Success (K2S) is a 5-year organization that brings quality music education to Pre-K to 8th-grade students in the most underserved areas of Newark. By providing free, daily piano lessons delivered in a group setting in the students' own environment, teachers and volunteers work to remove barriers and support students as they develop into future leaders. Volunteers come from Newark and surrounding areas, including Summit, New Providence, Westfield, Short Hills, Elizabeth, Plainfield, Scotch Plains, Glen Ridge, Fanwood and Warren. K2S was founded by Jee-Hoon Krska, a Juilliard-trained pianist and electrical engineer with a Ph.D. from MIT. Dr. Krska spent twenty years in the semiconductor industry. During that time, she was actively

involved in a series of projects aimed at serving Newark youths living in public housing. She saw firsthand the achievement gap which resulted from the vast disparity of opportunities afforded to children. In 2014, an unexpected invitation to perform in Symphony Hall sparked the idea of teaching piano to Newark students. Keys 2 Success draws inspiration from Jee-Hoon’s own tumultuous experience as an immigrant and the piano teachers who positively impacted her through her formative years.