EDISON — In an effort to improve its outreach efforts toward at-risk pupils, Edison High School recently instituted a student staff mentoring program intended to expand the currently available support network for those facing difficulties — whether academic, disciplinary or personal — at school.
The program, which started in December, pairs students with staff members who volunteer to act as a combination adviser, confidante and administrative conduit. About 140 people, from teachers to security guards to custodians, have stepped forward to mentor about 150 students, with some staff taking on more than one student.
Principal Salvatore Mistretta, who launched the program, said the goal is to help students feel more of a connection to their school and, consequently, their schoolwork. By having an adult to engage with, it is hoped that the student will see himself as more of a stakeholder in his or her education, rather than a passive receiver that earlier methodologies exemplified.
“You can’t run a school anymore in the traditional, old-fashioned ways. Kids need to have a positive feeling of their environment. It’s no longer ‘I’m teaching and you’re learning,’ it’s ‘I’m teaching and what are you learning?’… When I was a kid, and you got in front of a board, they chalked, they talked, and you learned,” said Mistretta.
He said that research has shown that when kids feel connected to their education and engaged with their school, performance tends to go up. The mentoring program is meant to foster this by facilitating relationships between students and staff. Mistretta said the specifics of how this is accomplished is left up to the mentor and the student, making it a very informal process. This was the intention, because he didn’t want the mentors to be associated with the aspects of school life that are typically viewed negatively by some students. By allowing the nature of the relationship to be negotiated between the two, it is hoped that the interaction can be something unique to that student.
“We don’t want them to be the discipline person,” said Mistretta. “We are not any longer just a teacher; we are the parent while they are here, the person they can confide in, in certain situations,” he added later.
The program began by looking at 300 students who were considered at risk for various reasons, whether it was for poor attendance, cutting class, police issues or academic performance.
“They weren’t bad kids. It was just a matter of, they weren’t functioning very well here,” said Mistretta.
About 30 of the staff members chose their students based on previous relationships with them, and the rest who volunteered were matched with a student based on perceived compatibility for that particular pupil’s personality and needs. After that, everyone was brought together in the auditorium and it was explained how the program would work.
“You got a little bit of ‘I don’t need a mentor,’ but [those were] very few. Very few. They were enthused about it, and I said, ‘It’s kind of in its infant stage, let’s see how it goes,’ ” said Mistretta.
The principal said that in the short time the program has
been active, both the staff and the students have been “running with it” in various ways. He said that things can be as casual as simply chatting for a little bit between classes or taking some of their mutual free time together.
They can also provide academic assistance, since the mentors collaborate with the students’ teachers to coordinate efforts to increase a student’s performance. The mentor, he said, might check in with their student’s math teacher or English teacher, for example, to see if an important test is coming down the road. The mentor can also act as an advocate for the student when he or she feels they need a voice in their school.
The mentor-student relationship is meant to be a more open forum than the typical teacher-student one. This is intended to allow a student to discuss more feely what is on his or her mind, whether it’s difficulties with a teacher, problems with other students, or even to debate the merits of the school’s no-hats policy.
“It could be ‘This teacher’s on my case,’ [or] ‘I can’t get my work done,’ and just as a voice, someone else to say, ‘Hey, you’re not the only person going through this stuff, and here is what I did,’ and make some suggestions or refer them in a direction that might be more helpful,” said Mistretta.
The mentor program buttresses other supports available to students, such as small-group discussions. He said that due to the newness of the program, it will be more than a year before the school will be able to assess what impact it has, but Mistretta said he believes there have been positive results already.
“We’ve talked to kids and we see it’s positive. Other teachers have now come on board who weren’t,” he said, noting that the proportion of staff volunteering is pretty good. “[There are] about 220 staff members in this building. For 120 folks to take part is pretty good.”
Contact Chris Gaetano at [email protected].