Walking down the west hall of Beaumont Middle School reinforced the venerable institutions’ significant presence within our Beaumont-Wilshire Neighborhood. As Jane Geason led me to her classroom/office, I could perceive the echoes of thousands of previous students bouncing off the well-used lockers and flooring along the veritable “hallway of learning”.
Jane has dedicated ten years to the Mentor Program at Beaumont— initially serving as a Mentor Volunteer, then co-chairing the program’s expansion from only 8th grade students to all grades, and finally achieving her present position as Mentor Coordinator and Academic Support Specialist. She recalled the early years when she cajoled her family and friends to become mentors to fill the demands of a program that quadrupled in size in just two years time.
The Mentor Program at Beaumont MS is one aspect of an overall effort to close the achievement gap which exists nationally and locally between students of color and their Caucasian peers. Ms. Geason deliberately matches one adult volunteer to one student for the course of the school year. These pairs of adult and student meet once a week during the school day. Their work together focuses on organization skills, project planning, goal setting and homework support. More often than not, the volunteers choose to stay with their student for all three years that the student attends Beaumont.
Jane works with teachers during the first 6 weeks or so of every school year to identify students who might benefit most from some focused help with their academic responsibilities. She then communicates with students and their parents to explain the program’s requirements, responsibilities and goals. Once parents provide their permission and students indicate their commitment, the matching process begins. Jane describes this process as “part art, part science, and part serendipity. There have been very few times over the last 10 years when the volunteer/student match was a bad match.”
Jane is supervises sessions in the dedicated Mentor Program classroom, and provides positive and helpful feedback to both student and adult volunteer with an eye toward facilitating the learning process. Both students and adult volunteers may need to be reminded and assured that progress usually happens incrementally over time. Jane tracks several forms of student data to assess program effectiveness. For the last several years, the year-end GPA for 90% of the 8th grade Mentor Students were higher than what they earned in 6th grade. This goes against the prevailing trend for middle school students across the country.
Jane Geason adds that, “Middle School is such an interesting time in a student’s life. These children are beginning to interact with and understand the world on a deeper and broader level than ever before. It can be exhilarating for them, but it can also be confusing and frightening at the same time. It’s exhilarating and rewarding for me too and I can’t think of another age group that I’d rather work with.” So, if you support education as being a key aspect of our American society’s future, contact Jane Geason at jgeason@pps.net to see how you might help and impact on a very local level.