WASHINGTON — This year, Thurgood Marshall Academy was the first D.C.. high school to make enough progress to exit ‘school improvement’ status under the No Child Left Behind Act. The public charter school serves ninth to 12th graders from some of the district’s most impoverished neighborhoods.
Teachers, staff and parents stand behind that success, but one other factor could have contributed as well: the school’s mentoring program.
The mentoring program at Thurgood Marshall pairs 10th grade students with local professionals. They meet outside of school and spend time doing various activities. Students can elect to continue seeing their mentor until their senior year.
And many do.
“My mentor is a peer, a friend,” said 17-year-old Quentino Hickman. “I actually have been doing better with my schoolwork and with my organization,” said Hickman, who wants to study business in college and plans to keep in touch with his mentor.
Andrea Daniels also said she cherishes the relationship she has with her mentor.
“She helps me out with everything, every trouble, every situation,” Daniels said. She called her a mentor a “wonderful woman who I can say has helped shape me into who I am today.”
Mentors mirror those feelings.
“It’s just nice to get away from the daily routine of adult life and remember what it’s like to be a high-schooler and spend some time with that youthful energy,” said mentor Emily Pierce, who has taken her student to basketball games and road trips.
Program director Scott Guggenheimer said it’s important for high school students to have a trustworthy adult in their lives. The school’s involvement, he said, is just as important.
“Certainly having this program inside of the school makes it a more continuous relationship for the kid,” said Guggenheimer, who touches base with all the mentors and students after an activity or meeting.
“Ultimately it affects their lives beyond the classroom,” he said. Many Thurgood Marshall students have aspirations to pursue college and even specific majors as a result of their mentors’ coaching.
At Turner Elementary School, just a few miles south of Thurgood Marshall, mentors are impacting students at a much earlier age.
Tuner Elementary is one of five school sites that offer Heads Up, an after-school mentoring and tutoring program, to kids in kindergarten up to fifth grade.
Heads Up is a literacy-based program that places college students from local universities in elementary classrooms to lead reading lessons after school.
Chloe Wiley, site director for Heads Up at Turner Elementary, said the program is mutually beneficial for the college mentors and kids.
“We really want to boost reading skills and make it fun for the kids, while also exposing our college students to some of the challenges that our students face,” said Wiley.
“The college kids bring new life to the lessons and the plan and they just give them extra support,” she added.
The students said they don’t mind trading in a few more hours each day to enrich their learning.
“With our vocabulary words we play Hangman and stuff like that,” said third grader Ray Shon Garner, who said she enjoys fun activities that the mentors lead.
Wiley said Heads Up works because its program is consistent with the school’s.
“This is a safe place for them after the school day ends, that they can get their homework done, that they can read extra, learn more, because the day is not long enough to fill the gaps that we currently have in our school system,” said Wiley.
She added that many of the students are already curious about college because of the relationships they’re building with their mentors.
School-based mentoring programs such as the ones at Thurgood Marshall Academy and Heads Up at Turner Elementary are becoming more popular. According to MENTOR, a national advocate for mentoring, 30 percent of all mentoring programs are located in schools.