By KYLIE STONE

What can you do with a Deerfield education? You could go on to college, be a lawyer, doctor, banker, CEO, or, like Megan Fraker '95, you could think outside of the box.

Fraker, who will be coming to campus this April to speak to all participants in Co-Curricular Community Service, works at the Boston division of Partners in Education. The organization, currently in its 38th year, puts together an array of service projects to improve the value of the education at inner city schools. "Having been a faculty child at Deerfield and having later attended DA, I never realized how lucky and blessed we all are," said Fraker. This insight inspired her to help others, which she now does for a living!

Working for the Boston Partners in Education, Fraker has become the coordinator of the "Power Lunch Program," a subdivision of the BPIE that matches corporate volunteers with children in the first through third grades. Each week, for one hour during their lunch break, volunteers go to inner city schools and read to young students. However Fraker says that volunteers often say that they don't finish the books and spend a lot of time talking instead. The program instills a love of reading in the young students and allows them "to get a positive adult role model that they may otherwise not have had," said Fraker.

The person-to-person connection that the Power Lunch program provides was a connection that Fraker discovered in her gap year between Deerfield and college. Having heard an alum from the class of '93 speak highly of the AmeriCorps program, Fraker entered the City Year Boston subdivision and spent the year doing 1700 hours of community service. As part of those many hours, she worked as an assistant teacher in a Boston public school.

In her address on April 23rd, she will talk about her experience in AmeriCorps, Boston Partners in Education, influences in her decision to enter a non-profit organization, and how "community service can lead to a career." Mara Whalen, who contacted Ms. Fraker, says that she can "can shed some light on the importance of service in the lifelong trajectory as opposed to the Heritage Day, one afternoon per year, service mentality."