Mentoring Matters

Cleto Chazares • Cahn Fellow 2022

What do indicators mean? In an automobile, the indicators mean that your car needs mechanical attention.  Failure to address the issue will either leave you stranded or worse, you may need to purchase a new car. On a professional evaluation, indicators show an area that you must work on or pay attention to. Yet on a student’s profile, indicators give us key pieces of data that a particular student will either be successful in school or struggle academically and potentially drop out of school. The faculty and staff at our school pride themselves on working hard with these students to mitigate their unique challenges and provide creative instructional opportunities to overcome their fragmented belief of not being able to graduate from high school.

The focus of our project was two-tiered: establishing a robust mentorship program that will capacitate students with maintaining academic focus, self-advocacy, healthier relationships, enhancing self-esteem and self-confidence, developing higher educational and career-oriented aspirations, and improving overall behavior in and outside of school. The second aspect of our focus, which connects directly to the mentorship, was to establish a fluid student performance tracking system that can monitor student progress so that we are able to intervene in real time instead of the end of the semester.