Once a month, 7-year-old Damaris Nova writes an invitation to her father, sometimes drawing a picture of them together or attaching a snapshot.
“We hope you can join us,” she wrote this month before slipping into his bedroom and placing the note on a nightstand where he couldn’t miss it.
The next morning, the second-grader with the long, brown ponytail waited in her classroom at William Monroe Trotter School, frequently looking over her shoulder to see whether her father had arrived for a meeting of the “Dads Club.”
For the past three years, dozens of fathers have descended on this Dorchester elementary school once a month to participate in a program designed to bolster the tangential role that many men play in their children’s education.
At first, attendance was poor. Only a handful of men showed up to what was then billed as a “coffee hour.” But then the school’s family outreach coordinator, Karen Harris, tried a new tactic, crafting a flier that appeared as if it were the children extending the invitation. And more than 50 men showed up.
