The Ripple Effect of Mentoring in Action

It is 3:15 on a Tuesday afternoon and outside L. C. Webster Elementary School in North St. Paul there is a bustling of students clambering into cars, buses, and otherwise milling around waiting for their rides to come. Spread throughout four classrooms and a gymnasium inside the school, however, many students are turning their attention to the next hour. These five rooms and varied groups of students are composed of Webster students , their teachers, and high school students from ISD 622, North St. Paul, Oakdale, and Maplewood. These students have come together in the interest of providing a learning environment unlike that provided in the classroom during the school day; they’ve come to explore art, both performance and hand crafted, engineering, reading, the Boy Scouts, and sports. The elementary students stay for the opportunity of the co-curricular activities and to be in community with a high school mentor. The high school students join them in these “Sparks Time” afterschool activities because they are aware of the effect that the achievement gap is having in their community and have decided to act against it. By joining these young students in exploring a wide array of interests, the teachers and high school mentors provide an environment rich with inquiry and role modeling. In turn, and through the processes of serving, these high school students learn how to be of service, they learn about their capacity as role models and citizens, and as teachers, and, along with the young ones they serve, they learn how to participate as team members, actors and creators, and even improve their reading and communication skills. This desire to create a community of possibility through inquiry and service in an environment struggling against the pressures of the achievement gap is the very picture of service-learning.

Four years ago Angelica Torralba-Olague and her first group of students from ISD 622 joined NYLC at the summer National Youth Leadership Training (NYLT) and has returned each following year. Since then the program has taken various forms and served in varying capacities within the school district, but it has always maintained its strong emphasis on student leadership and being of service to its community. Two years ago marked the premier of Students Working on the Achievement Gap. SWAG as it is popularly known, aimed to empower high school students to tackle the issue of the achievement gap in their schools by positioning them as mentors to younger students, and following its success in year one has expanded to include “Sparks Time.” SWAG is still active, emphasizing one-on-one mentoring with students and their class work in the afterschool setting differing slightly from “Sparks Time” which offers a host of different activities and learning outcomes, switching topics every six to eight weeks. Since its inception Project SWAG has also seen the creation of a student-led college access and visit program and a student-led staff training  for school staff working with young people in service-learning.  Angelica says that, leaving NYLT, her students had “the foundational knowledge about service-learning and the achievement gap” and NYLT had “instilled in them the passion to share and the ability to direct and plan their own service-learning projects.” “The SMART Youth Solutions to the Achievement Gap™ handbook, was pivotal.” As this group continues to expand its ambitions it relies on the high school mentors to recruit and train new mentors, cultivating an aura of service in their school community.

From upper left: Matilda Cooke sits with a student from Webster Elementary as he reads, ready to aid if needed. She says that her role is to help them improve their reading, and that she comes back because the kids and the atmosphere are “just amazing.” High school students help the elementary students with their reading and other homework in the model that SWAG was created on.

Middle Row from left: Cheng Xiong aids a student with her handwriting and learning how to write the letters “U” and “S.” A substitute teacher watches over a group as they create with each other using beads. A high school mentor is seen seated at the table in the foreground right side of the picture.

Bottom row from left: students in this group are working with Kinex as a way to understand how to work with each other, how to engineer stable structures. They begin with simple bridges and work up to the more complex coaster structures. A group playing soccer, an activity that is just plain fun, but also cultivates teamwork, role modeling, sportsmanship, and coordination amongst other valuable skills.