GOSHEN — After eight years serving as an adult mentor to at-risk students, Julia Fry knows how powerful the gift of volunteerism can be to a child in need.
Fry is director of the Green Road Church branch of KIDS HOPE USA, a national adult mentor training program based out of Holland, Mich. The group has partnered with Model Elementary School since 2003 to provide mentors to at-risk students within the school system.
“Being a mentor is so important to these kids,” Fry said during a visit to the school Friday afternoon. “I would like to see every school have a program like this. It’s so very rewarding, and the school is so thankful for what we’ve done.”
Unfortunately, the need for more mentors always seems to outweigh the supply, Fry said, adding that growing financial concerns and time constraint over the past few years have slowly whittled away the number of volunteers knocking on her door.
And according to officials with many of the other local schools in the area, this difficulty in recruiting adult mentors has become a consistent challenge.
Luckily, it appears this concern is finally getting some much needed recognition down at the Statehouse, where both Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett and Indiana State Teachers Association President Nate Schnellenberger recently advocated the need for increased adult mentor recruitment in a joint Statehouse press conference this past Tuesday.
According to Ray Helmuth, principal at Prairieview Elementary School in Goshen, recruitment of new adult mentors has never been an easy thing, though in the past year or so numbers for his school have been a bit higher than average.
“Recruitment has always been hard, but I don’t think it’s getting harder,” Helmuth said. “In fact I think there was a period of time over this past year or so where mentor volunteering was actually up a bit because of the amount of unemployment in the area.”
Alan Metcalfe, principal at West Goshen Elementary School, has also noticed recruitment of volunteers become less of a problem over the past couple of years, though he admits in his case this is due primarily to the proactiveness of his staff.
“We actually have what’s called the iCARE program, where we have a volunteer coordinator, Amy Walters, who is positioned to go out and be a liaison with the community,” Metcalfe said. “The first year Amy spent a lot of time developing relationships with community organizations and businesses in the area, and now that we’ve been doing it for a couple years, she’s gotten much more efficient at knowing who to contact and who to talk to in order to find good mentors.”
Metcalfe did note, however, that mentor numbers at the school have fluctuated noticeably over the years.
“Some of our volunteers have dropped off as the economic times have kind of hardened,” Metcalfe said. “Some businesses were originally very willing to let their employees have time off to work with our kids, and now some of those opportunities have kind of dried up.”
For Helmuth, the hardest thing he has encountered with regard to adult mentoring is actually keeping those mentors who sign up coming back on a regular basis.
“The really tough thing is getting adult mentors who can commit to a set schedule,” Helmuth said. “Anytime you have volunteers, you are at the whim of the rest of their life. Because of that, we have to be very careful in what we’re expecting out of them.”
This also appears to be a common theme at Chandler Elementary School in Goshen.
“To me, a good adult mentor is somebody that makes this commitment to come consistently, makes it a priority always to be here,” said Chandler Principal Lisa Lederach. “In the end, it’s about having some other person in that child’s life that they feel like they can count on.”
Like Fry, Helmuth said that while the role of an adult mentor may not be all that difficult to fill, the impact of that role can have a major and lasting effect on these kids throughout both their young and adult lives.
“We usually assign mentors to kids that need the interest of an adult in their lives,” Helmuth said. “Maybe they struggle with friendships, or emotional problems, and they often don’t have a father or mother at home.
“Then also there are students who are weak in an area such as reading or math, so the role of mentor is kind of an emotional/academic combo for us,” he said.
While this role of helping a child grow academically is an important one, Lederach echoed Helmuth in saying that it is by no means the only — and possibly not even the most important — role such a mentor can play.
In fact, Lederach said that one of the biggest obstacles she has found to people volunteering to serve as an adult mentor is their fear that they do not have the proper educational background to be successful.
“From my point of view it’s not about how much education they have,” Lederach said. “It’s much more about the ability of these mentors to care for a child.
“I would be much more concerned about whether they could be committed and be there every week than how educated they are,” she said.
Metcalfe was quick to agree.
“Ideally I would like the mentor to become not just a friend, not just a parental figure, but someone the student can open up to, talk to about their frustrations, about what they like to do, and then have that mentor support them,” Metcalfe said. “That I think is the biggest priority, to just have that emotional support.”
Luckily, schools today have made it relatively easy to become a mentor, with a criminal background check being the only real requirement for admittance. In addition, training sessions are also available for those who may want to be a mentor, but feel they don’t have the skills to do it properly.
“We do a criminal background check, but we do that with anyone who works with kids these days,” Helmuth said. “I also meet with them prior to accepting them, because I want to get a sense of who they are. But I’ve never met anyone who had an interest who I didn’t think would make a good mentor.”
For those interested in volunteering as an adult mentor, Helmuth said the best way to get started is simply to contact one of the many local schools in the area and let them know that you would like to volunteer.
“We are always on the lookout for more mentors,” Helmuth said. “ As it is, we’ve just barely scratched the surface of our need.”