The P.S. 145 Parent Teacher Association is aiming to raise $17,000 by mid-January through a GoFundMe campaign in order to continue the school’s new chess curriculum.

New this fall, in-curriculum chess instruction is provided for all kindergarteners through 5th graders at the school. Currently, each student receives chess programming approximately once a week, specifically once every 6-day curriculum cycle.

“As a Title 1 school, we’re over 70 percent low income families, and we feel that asking our families to foot the bill for a lot of these things is hard on them,” Lauren Balaban, co-president of the P.S. 145 PTA and lead organizer of the GoFundMe, said. “But we feel that just because our community can’t necessarily afford to raise the money for this enrichment, it doesn’t mean that these kids don’t deserve this enrichment.”

The New York City Department of Education only covers the per capita costs of core subjects, such as math and English. Individual schools are left to raise money for enrichment programs like music, art, and chess, according to Naveed Hasan, SEAS ’00, ’02, the government affairs committee chair of the education department’s Panel for Education Policy and a P.S. 145 parent.

The PTA created the GoFundMe on Nov. 18 after it recognized in September that their direct appeal fundraising campaign from last school year would not cover the full costs of a chess program through the remainder of the school year.

After trying to raise smaller donations through a mailer campaign and internal parent donations, the PTA determined that it would need to execute a larger GoFundMe initiative among its broader New York City community and network to cover the cost—not the first time that the group has considered a GoFundMe campaign.

“We used to have math logic and reasoning,” Hasan said. “It was called logic and reasoning enrichment, which involved a lot of math puzzles, and the teacher has moved on. So we replaced that with chess, and it’s doing a lot of the same logic and reasoning type of thinking, something that’s not part of your standardized testing curriculum, which is really an important thing for schools to be doing.”

The free curricular chess programming is new as of this school year, but P.S. 145 has hosted a paid after-school chess program for the past three years. The after- school program and chess curriculum are both organized by Eight by Eight, an external organization through which two instructors teach chess at P.S. 145.

“I think it’s a great way to build some problem solving, logical thinking,” Nitai Leve, a chess teacher at P.S. 145 and the founder of Eight by Eight, said about chess. “I think some aspects of the game get a little bit overblown … but I think for the most part, it does teach patience, concentration. When you’re on the more competitive side, it teaches goal setting and work ethic and delayed gratification.”

Some P.S. 145 parents agreed on the benefits of having chess as a part of their students’ daily schedules and school instruction.

“I think you never know what kids are going to be interested in,” Anna Azvolinsky, co-vice president of the P.S. 145 PTA, said. “Especially when they’re young, letting them sample different things to figure that out, because you don’t always know what you’re going to be into—I think that’s really important.”