District seeks additional adult mentors

One of the programs uses foster grandparents who must be at least 50.
By HAROLD GWIN
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- The Youngstown City School District is running limited mentoring programs at the elementary, middle and high school levels, but it needs more volunteers to expand the effort.
"We've got mentors, but we need more," Claudia Charity, the district's manager of community partnerships, told a group of about 30 parents attending a "Building the Dream Together" meeting Thursday.
A positive adult relationship in kids' lives really can make a difference, she said, pointing out that mentors serve as coaches and guides for schoolchildren. The ultimate goal is to improve academics, she said.
The district has formed partnerships with a number of agencies to help run mentoring programs, including the Neil Kennedy Recovery Clinic, Recovery Restoration Inc. and Big Brothers, Big Sisters of the Mahoning Valley.
Elementary programs
Youngstown has two mentoring programs at the elementary level: Youngstown Stars and Mentoring From the Heart.
Youngstown Stars is a tutoring /mentoring/foster grandparent program that has people over age 50 serving as mentors to children in kindergarten through the fourth grade in the Cleveland, Harding, North, Sheridan, Taft and Williamson buildings.
Participants spend between six and 10 hours a week with their designated pupils.
Mentoring From the Heart is a newer program featuring one-on-one mentoring efforts that reaches four elementary schools -- Cleveland, Southside Upper, Sheridan and Williamson -- and the Alpha School of Excellence for Boys and the Athena School of Excellence for Girls. The latter schools are middle schools.
Children in grades four through eight are targeted in that program, and mentors are asked to spend at least one hour a week with their assigned pupil.
A mentoring program targeting ninth grade boys in the district's three high schools was just launched in September. The goal is to have 50 mentors for each building, but the district has been able to enlist a total of about 50 so far. Men from outside the school district are eligible to participate. All adult participants must pass a background check.
Participants in that program are also asked to give one hour per week.
Here's the plan
The ideal situation is to eventually provide a continuum of mentoring support from elementary through the high school years, said Dawud Abdullah, the district's manager of safe and drug-free schools.
Charity said some adult women in the community have been asking about creating a mentoring program for ninth-grade girls and that is something Youngstown intends to do.
The immediate focus was to get a program up and running for the boys first, she said.
There are also discussions pending on the creation of a mentoring program for high school students enrolled in Youngstown Early College at Youngstown State University, she said.
gwin@vindy.com