Making mentoring's impact matter


  • January 3, 2016
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   education

Take Stock In Children mentor Jim Smith meets with junior Darin Redick at Pensacola High School Thursday December
10, 2015 in Pensacola, Florida. Smith has been a mentor to Redick for five years. (Michael Spooneybarger/ CREO)

What are you prepared to do?

If the public perception of Escambia County’s education system is murky, answering that question — as individuals and as a community — is the key to clearing that path.

According to the 2015 PYP Quality of Life survey, released in October, only 31 percent of respondents gave the school system a rating of “good” or “excellent.”

The overwhelming majority — 66 percent of people — rated Pensacola’s public schools and fair or poor.

What would change that?

In the same survey, 48 percent of people said volunteering or mentoring a student is the best way to boost the school system’s performance.

Jim Smith certainly believes in it.

The Marine has mentored Darin Redick for five years through the Take Stock in Children program. Smith has been with Redick, now a junior at Pensacola High School, since he was a seventh-grader at Warrington Middle School.

“I've thought about relocating and doing things, leaving the area, but I want to stay around to see Darin graduate,” Smith says.

Now the soft-spoken young man, the oldest of four children and son of a single mom, is staying focused on his grades and making time to study at home.

{{business_name}}Take Stock In Children mentor Jim Smith meets with junior Darin Redick at Pensacola High School Thursday December 10, 2015 in Pensacola, Florida. Smith has been a mentor to Redick for 5 years. (Michael Spooneybarger/ CREO)

Take Stock In Children mentor Jim Smith meets with junior Darin Redick at Pensacola High School Thursday December 10, 2015 in Pensacola, Florida. Smith has been a mentor to Redick for 5 years. (Michael Spooneybarger/ CREO)

“I think the difference that I've made is that when times are tough, or there are family problems ... Darin is from a single-parent family, and there are all kind of challenges, and things that could demotivate someone.

“With his siblings being small, a lot of times he has to take care of them, and he just has to stay focused, so I've told him, ‘You can do it. Don't give up. Stay focused.’

“That transition from middle school to high school was tough. I wasn't sure if he was going to make it, but he wanted to make it, his mom wanted him to make it,” Smith says. Read more about Darin here.

Take Stock is a statewide program that matches mentors with students from poor families. Students who complete Take Stock by keeping at least a 2.5 GPA, meeting citizenship and attendance requirements, and staying away from crime and drugs, get an $8,400 college scholarship.

How is Take Stock in Children funded?

Program Operations:

State funds:  $106,355.00 is the Escambia County Take Stock allocation from the $6.25 million Department of Education grant appropriated to the Take Stock in Children state program. Funds provide one-on-one mentoring and comprehensive wrap-around college readiness and support services to more than 8,500 middle and high school students statewide.

Private Funds: $9,500 comes from local business sponsorships, fundraisers, and unrestricted donations to cover our program events and expenses that cannot be paid from grant money.

Scholarships:

State funds: Local scholarship donations are matched by the Stanley G. Tate Florida Prepaid College Foundation. In 2015, it will be nearly, $130,000.

Local funds: Escambia County’s Take Stock in Children Program raised nearly $130,000 in local scholarship donations from businesses, foundations, organizations, and individuals for scholarships purchased in April 2015.

The Florida Prepaid Foundation matches the donations to the program dollar for dollar. Locally, 255 students have used the Take Stock program to make college a reality.

Many say that was something they never dreamed possible before the program.

“I'm really, really happy about getting chosen to go to the program, and actually be able to go to college, because this wasn't really something that we were really thinking about, not having all the money and everything, I wasn't going to be able to go,” Redick says. “This is something really big, actually being able to go, and actually being able to do something big with my life.”

Sally Lee, coordinator of Take Stock in Escambia County, said 97 percent of the local students in the program graduate high school, compared to the overall district graduation rate of 66 percent and the state graduation rate of 76 percent.

The statewide graduation rate for at-risk students who aren’t in Take Stock is 57 percent.

“It is interesting that many of our college grads go into careers that allow them to give back: teachers, social workers, nurses, senior citizen care, to name a few,” Lee says.

Research on mentoring shows mixed outcomes

While the data on that Take Stock shows its effectiveness, academic literature on mentoring varies widely.

Many studies have examined mentoring relationships and the effects of these programs on youth, their academic performance and behavioral development.

Read more on the Haas Center for Business Research and Economic Development's research review of the effectiveness of mentoring here.

Nearly all of these studies report some positive outcomes associated with these programs, including those that report better outcomes with education and work, mental health, problem behavior and health.

But the effects tend to be small.

That is according to analysis of available research on the topic by the University of West Florida’s Haas Center for Business Research and Economic Development.

The most effective mentoring relationships depend on the strength of connection created between mentor and mentee, as well as the length of time the relationship endures.

Training mentors is a crucial piece of the puzzle, too.

Finding the best match is something that Lee, with Escambia’s Take Stock program, works hard to do.

Dr. Andi Minyard was matched with Danielle Rodriguez when Rodriguez was a seventh-grader at Brown-Barge Middle School.

“This is a program that I joined because I felt like I had something to give to someone who needed a push in the right direction and that’s all Danielle needed,” says Minyard, who is the chief medical examiner for the First Judicial Circuit of Florida. “I wanted her to see it happened with me even though my family didn’t have a lot of money either.”

Minyard followed Rodriguez throughout her high school years as she attended Pine Forest, Escambia high and “I think even Woodham. She moved around quite a lot.”

Finding the best match

Rodriguez said Minyard was not the first mentor she was matched with, but when she didn’t connect with that initial mentor, Lee worked to find her a better fit.

Which turned out to be Minyard.

“The program is good with finding people you click with and they paired me up with Andi,” Rodriguez says. “She was easy to talk to. She was always wanting to know what was going on in school. I talked to her about boys, just about anything.”

{{business_name}}Danielle Rodriguez, a Take Stock in Children Scholarship program alum, graduates from the University of West Florida this spring with two bachelor's degrees. Special to the Studer Community Institute

Danielle Rodriguez, a Take Stock in Children Scholarship program alum, graduates from the University of West Florida this spring with two bachelor's degrees. Special to the Studer Community Institute

Rodriguez comes from a family of five headed by a working single mother.

“(My mom) worked and had five kids. She’d be tired after working all day, and my younger sisters were babies at the time, so she’d have to tend to them first,” she says.

Minyard was another needed adult voice who was hers — and hers alone — to rely on for advice.

“It was just nice to have another adult in my life who I could talk about little silly things like boys and friends and the important things like goals.”

Minyard says “I would always harp on her for taking the ACT or SAT, to get in the prep classes for those. I helped her get a copy of her birth certificate to get your driver’s license, or to get copies of her transcripts when applying to colleges.

“She didn’t have a paper trail because they moved around a lot.”

“I would ask how are you doing in your studies, who you hanging out with, how’s your boyfriend, don’t you dare get pregnant,” she says. “I was just like a nagging mom figure, but she pretty much took care of it, just like my daughters (who are now 14 and 17) do now.

While she fully credits Rodriguez’s inner drive to succeed, Minyard says she does feel like she had a good influence on her mentee.

“I think she’s got a mentor for life and I’ve got mentee for life,” Minyard says. “I’m someone she can bounce ideas off of, I’ve got someone I can always advise. She can always come to me.”

When she graduates from UWF this spring, Rodriguez will complete two bachelor’s degrees — one in marketing and one in sports marketing. She is working two jobs and taking four classes with an eye toward graduating this spring.

Obviously, drive is not her issue.

She thinks it would be cool to be an athletic director at a university and worked in UWF game operations and interned with their marketing director for the experience.

She and Minyard still meet for dinner, and she is deeply grateful for the opportunity Take Stock gave her.

“And my mom’s really grateful for that opportunity,” she says. “My older sister got an art degree at UWF. My oldest brother is in and out of school,  and seeing him struggle” reinforces the importance of finishing her degree.  

She’s also working on passing on what she learned about the importance of a college degree to her two younger siblings.

“I’m working on it,” Rodriguez says. “The junior realizes that she needs to have a plan. I send her articles and tips. The younger one I’m still working on.”

Making education a priority for everyone

Building those connections has been the goal of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northwest Florida, which has worked to match mentors with young people for 26 years.

In 2013-2014, BBSS served 275 children, including “littles” at O.J. Semmes, Navy Point, C.A. Weis elementary schools, Ferry Pass and Workman middle schools.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northwest Florida

According to data from Big Brothers Big Sisters, of the students who are matched for six months or longer:

— 83 percent maintained or improved academic performance; 87 percent improved or maintained attendance.

— 82 percent were promoted to the next grade level.

— 91 percent completed individual case plan goals.

Shane Rowe has been on the BBSS board for many years and was part of the social media campaign to help build interest in the 100 Men in 100 Days effort.

That campaign aimed to find 100 men to serve as mentors to kids in the Big Brothers program. Rowe also served as a “big” to a student at Brentwood Elementary.

“I was raised in two parent household; my kids was in a single parent household with three siblings,” Rowe said. “Getting into it, I was a bit nervous to do it. I found sometimes they just need somebody to talk to.”

“All it took was for me to say, ‘what do you have to do for homework tonight?’ for him to understand that it was important to do.”

The good that can be done from mentoring is encouraging and worth the effort to those who get involved. Expanding that sense of ownership across the whole community is something Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward III says he wants to encourage.

{{business_name}}Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward III. Michael Spooneybarger/Studer Community Institute

Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward III. Michael Spooneybarger/Studer Community Institute

In the summer, Hayward says he spoke to kids at the Cobb Community Center. It was an experience that in some way seemed as valuable to him as it was to the children who used the center’s summer program.

“You get an up close and personal look through a different lens,” Hayward said. “you think, ‘This where we need to be.’ There’s 100 kids at Cobb Center five days a week, and I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a 100.

“How can we as a community better get our children prepared for education when they start kindergarten,” he says. “Is it community volunteering? I think we have lot of people in this community who could volunteer. Maybe the city needs to reach out and get in our community centers. When you ask, people overwhelmingly say ‘I’ll go read.’”

Hayward said investing in computers and software to improve access to after-school resources are something he’d be willing to invest in. He also said he would be willing to explore a partnership with UWF students that could encourage mentorship among college students under the city’s auspices.

“We have to drive the results,” he said. “If we’re not going to put the effort into that, what are we doing?”

 
Your items have been added to the shopping cart. The shopping cart modal has opened and here you can review items in your cart before going to checkout