This is an image of our mentor schedule. The setup is slightly complicated as we have had to coordinate schedules between the high school and the elementary school. However, we found a schedule that worked. We shared it with the counselor at NPE and all the high school mentors, which makes it much easier for everyone to keep track of mentor dates and times. We also send reminder emails the day before students have mentoring.
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As we near the end of organization for this project, we are tying up all the loose ends and preparing for the whole semester. We still have a few problems to work out, but I can tell we are so close to the program running smoothly on its own.
First, we still need more guy mentors from the high school, but we have asked multiple people, and no one is stepping up to do it. They either have other responsibilities or just don't want to, and we don't want to force it on someone who won't care as much. Also, we have one elementary student who may not continue in the program, so we need to make other arrangements for that, and we have one more elementary student who is going to be more involved than we expected. Our next steps are to figure out how to create a meeting time for every student, so no students are left out. We want each student, especially the elementary students, to be positively impacted by this program! We have also been keeping track of a list of things that should be done next year to make this program a success sooner. Hopefully a group will be willing to take it on early in the year, and we want to provide them with as many helpful details as possible, so they can get the program running sooner than we did. Once we finish this list, Austin and I will both post it to our blogs, so the groups next year will have it as a resource. This semester, it has been a much smoother transition to line up our high school schedule with the elementary school's schedule. Now that we have access to and understand the UA schedule until Spring Break, we were able to schedule all of our current mentor pairs for multiple meeting times in the next few months. We have already had one mentor go to NPE this semester, and we have multiple more pairs meeting within the next week!
However, with every success comes a few problems to trip you up. We are still short on high school guys to mentor. We have emailed multiple guys, checked with Mr. Large, texted a few more guys, and we still haven't found another guy to mentor. We are hoping to find one by the end of the week, but if we can't, one option is to have one of our current mentors meet with two elementary students. We don't want to have to do this, but we may have to if it comes down to it. One other problem we have run into is some of our mentor pairs don't have any matched-up dates from February 9th to Spring Break. This is a really long break, so we are brainstorming ways to fix this gap. Overall, though, we are very excited that the program is starting to fall into place! Our next steps are to fix these problems, and then once all the mentor pairs are scheduled and ready to go, we will be ready to brainstorm ways to pass this program on to a few seniors next year, so kids can continue being mentored. Our mentor program is finally in place!! As of tomorrow, December 15th, every mentor will have gone to New Palestine Elementary and worked with an elementary school student. We are so excited! Based on feedback from the high school students, the program has been going really well. We are eager to get feedback from the elementary school students and NPE's social worker as well! I think this trial run of the program has been very successful, and it looks like the success will continue next semester.
Our next step is to get study hall rosters for next semester. We are planning on keeping the mentor pairs as similar as we can, but we have to find out when the high schoolers are available. We can't wait to get the program on a more permanent schedule next semester! The last two weeks have been full of chaos, thinking, reading, scheduling, and emailing, but I'm happy to announce we have finally worked out the details of our program for this semester!!
We started to run into scheduling problems when we realized the kids could only be met with during lunch, recess, or UA. This was a problem because it didn't overlap with the lab times or after school times we had originally offered to our high school students, so it turned out, some of the students who had signed up couldn't participate due to unavailability. A few students, however, had study hall during a period that lined up perfectly with NPE's lunch schedule. After realizing this, we asked Mrs. Whitaker if we could take a look at her study hall rosters throughout the whole day to see if there were any other students who may be good role models for the kids and interested in mentoring once a week. We were able to find a few more students this way whose schedules lined up with UA, lunch, or recess at NPE. Once we had finally gotten enough high school students who were good for the job, we had to start matching students up based on times available and the applications we had gotten back. We were able to match up some surprisingly good pairs considering the limited time availabilities and limited high schoolers available, so we were very excited about that! Next, we had to go through the NPHS and NPE schedules and find the overlapping days and times in the next three weeks. We wrote all of these on the calendar you can see below, and we started to plan the days and times our high schoolers could go. Then, we sent individualized emails to each high school student, and now we are just waiting for responses from each of them on which date they plan on going to mentor! Our next steps include talking to NPE about where the high school students need to go when they arrive, making sure every high school student is prepared, communicating all the dates to NPE, and then starting to plan the real program for next semester. I am so excited about all the progress we have made, and I can't wait to watch this unfold in the next few weeks! This week, we have still been waiting on some last minute details and information, so we continued working on our activity packet for the mentor pairs to use. We have been enjoying coming up with activities for them to participate in that would both be fun and bring the pairs together as friends. Here are some more examples of of our activities: Today, we received an update from New Palestine Elementary. We have been waiting on this for awhile now. The counselor gave us more information about the times the students will be available and how many students there are. We are hoping to meet with her sometime next week to try and finalize the details and set up the mentor pairs!
As we've been waiting for all of our student applications to come in this week, we have been working on creating activities for the mentors and mentees to use when they meet. The goal of these activities is to help develop a friendship between the students. They are centered around getting to know each other, learning from each other, and being creative together. We have created a packet that the high school students can pick up from the counselor when they come to the elementary school. The packets will contain multiple different activities the students can use. Although optional, we hope they'll be very helpful in building a friendship between the pairs! Below are some examples of some of the activities we have created for the students.
This week, we have been working on some details that are bringing us even closer to starting up the SMILE Program! First, we realized that there weren't enough high school students yet to mentor at NPE, so we contacted Mr. Barton about his list. He sent us the list of students he had already asked. After going through this list, we realized his list was missing a lot of very qualified names. We asked him if it would be alright if we created another list and contacted all of those students about our program, and he said we could do that. Therefore, we created a new list of students who we have seen and talked to at school who we believed would make good mentors for the elementary students. We chose students who are responsible, reliable, and compassionate. After getting Mr. Barton's approval of these names, we sent an email to the students with our mentor application attached and asked anyone interested to fill it out and send it back to us. We have had many responses so far, and we are still expecting and hoping for more.
We heard from NPE's counselor, and she said there may be up to 15 students interested at NPE, so our goal is to get 15 high school students, so we can reach out to all of those kids. We are so thankful for all the high schoolers who have applied so far, and we can't wait to get the program started after fall break! Since Pitch Day, we have made a lot of adjustments and improvements to our SMILE program. First, we decided that the program would have to occur after the elementary school day. However, we realize that students may have limited availability after school, so we may need to make adjustments to mentor matches as time goes on and sports seasons change. Next, we talked to the bus garage and got approval for transportation of elementary kids from BWE and SCE to NPE, but they could not provide transportation after the program. Finally, we talked to Mr. Large, high school administration, and elementary school staff members, and we realized that it would be difficult to get staff members and a nurse to stay after that late. After putting all of this together, we came to the conclusion that our program was going to need to be almost completely re-worked. Because of the transportation issues, we decided that we are going to need to do this program during school instead of after school. Since it's difficult to pull students out of class, we have to follow a schedule that works with the students' school days. Therefore, the program is going to become a lot more one-on-one. We met with Mrs. Williamson , the social worker at NPE, and she told us that she liked the idea and was willing to help us get it set up. Our plan right now is to continue using our match papers to match students, but students will meet at different times of the day depending on when is most convenient. Although it was a little disappointing that our original idea wasn't going to work out, we have adopted a new mindset and decided to make the most out of what we have to work with. Even if we only have the opportunity to impact a few students, that's better than impacting no students at all. We are going to take what we can get and do our best to make this program as great as it can be. Our next step to work towards getting the SMILE program running is to find high school students that would be willing and able to help with this program. Then we will get our match sheets handed out to both the elementary and high school students, so we can make matches. Pitch Day was a day in which administrators from our school and the other district schools came to listen to our project ideas and give feedback. We got dressed up and created professional presentations to present our ideas, progress, and goals to the administrators. Pitch Day was very helpful because the administrators asked lots of questions and gave us plenty of feedback that helped us know what adjustments we needed to make.
The feedback we received helped us work out issues concerning liability, transportation, and timing. One administrator was concerned about the liability of the students and suggested we create a waiver or permission slip. Also, we were given the suggestion to have a nurse on site in case anything were to happen to any students. Another suggestion we were given was to look into talking with the bus garage to make sure transportation would be available after school, especially if we were interested in using this program with students from all three elementary schools. Finally, we were given suggestions about timing. There were lots of different opinions about the timing of our program. Some thought it was too intricate to do during school, while others thought it would be difficult to find students who were able to stay after school for the program. We plan on taking all of these suggestions into consideration and making adjustments to our program. Thanks to all the teachers and administrators who gave us feedback to help us make this program as successful as possible! |
AuthorMy name is Ellie Roudebush, and I'm a senior in the Advanced Business Management class at New Palestine High School. Archives
February 2018
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