For some freshmen, the transition from middle school to high school is very tough. From trying to find their classes, to fitting in with a certain group, lots of things are going through these students’ minds. However, a new program that is being introduced at LHS, Peer Mentoring, has been designed to ease that problem freshmen face with the help from their upperclassmen mentors. This has been in the works for the past year now by reading teacher Amy Downing and with the new year getting started, the peer mentors are ready to collaborate with the freshmen.
“The idea is to help the 9th graders with the transition into high school and give them a support system throughout the year,” Downing said. “So, hopefully [the mentors] will be able to develop relationships and make connections with the freshmen and kind of give the freshmen a connection with people outside their class too.”
Mentors come into classes once a month during their free periods. Trainings are also held once a month where mentors are given a specific curriculum they teach to their mentees.
“There will be a new topic every month. They will come in and do their lessons in the English classes and they are broken up into small groups,” Downing said. ”There might be four or five mentors in the class who spread out and work with those 3 or 4 or 5 kids, who they got grouped with. They can then work with each other as well if they need support or have questions. But basically, they are responsible for delivering that lesson to those kids in that small group.”
The idea of a peer mentoring program was brought to Downing after seeing how “difficult” the transition is for freshmen. Along with benefitting the mentees, having the program can now also help the mentors.
“Those relationships are built instead of them always being like ‘Oh I’m in this class with all these freshmen, but I’m also getting to know some upperclassmen as well’,” Downing said. “I thought that would be really great for the freshmen but also really great for the upperclassmen to learn leadership skills too.”
Last year, Downing was a frequent visitor to Salem High School’s peer mentoring program. Learning how they ran it and getting students opinions on the program was a stepping stone for LHS’s take on peer mentoring.
“We went periodically throughout the school year to Salem to see if it was an option. We brought different groups of kids who were interested in learning more about it,” Downing said. ”It really got those kids to give us feedback about whether it would be good for our school so that was the big thing.”
After Downing realized that it was the right fit for LHS, she started figuring out who the mentors would be. After teachers gave thoughts on who was right to be a mentor, applications were sent out. Since it is a “big commitment” Downing wanted students to be able to choose if they would apply or not.
Since then, different meetings have been held for both mentors and teachers leading up to the first day with the mentors and mentees. Overall, Downing has got “positive feedback” from the teachers.
“[Teachers] said they were really engaged and also a lot of help for them,” Downing said. “The English teachers have been so amazing, flexible, and patient so that was great.”
Along with the mentors, there are also E-Board members involved in the program. The E-Board member’s are considered the advisors of the groups. Junior Matt Wolf is one of those E-Board members. Wolf says that everyone is “really excited to get our peer mentoring program here at LHS ready to go”
“We have been working really hard to get the ball rolling. This year will give us a good idea on what works well and what doesn’t,” Wolf said. “As a first year program, we know there will be problems, but there will also be a lot of great things as well. Personally, I’m excited for the freshman to hopefully use their new resource [mentor] to help them guide themselves to do great things here at LHS.”
