A success mentor initiative addresses this challenge by encouraging districts to use their data to identify where additional adults, for example other parents or community volunteers, might be engaged to serve as a positive point of contact for a student and their family. Success mentors need to be able to turn to such a team to connect their mentees to additional supports and to identify and address common challenges that might be affecting more than one student.
Research shows that young people who were mentored set more ambitious educational goals and were more likely to go to college than their peers who did not have mentors. The third key component is a whole school approach to family engagement and attendance messaging. Attendance improves when a school has a welcoming and engaging environment that promotes relationships with families and conveys the importance of being in class every day. Schools can use their interactions with families to help them realize how just missing two days a month can throw them off track for learning and success in school.
In a whole school approach, success mentors are an essential component of a comprehensive, tiered approach to improving chronic absence. This begins with prevention and positive messaging, and then offers early intervention before moving to more intensive case management coordinated with the legal system. As this diagram shows, success mentors are part of the second tier of response, which is focused on early intervention.
Implementation of success mentor programs depends upon the backing of school leaders, especially principals, who set the stage for ensuring attendance is seen as a top priority by the entire school. It also requires district support to ensure the work at school sites is supported by data, training, and community partnerships. As described in the section How Do We Get Started , appointing a captain who can take the lead in developing and launching the strategy is especially essential.
While many key elements of a success mentor strategy are the same across grades, there are some key differences especially important when working among our youngest children, kindergarten through 2nd grade. Parent Notification: For young children, the first point of contact is the family. Reach out to the families and share how this program is a resource for them, too.
Mentor Selection and Training: When selecting and matching mentors with students, take into account the importance of having a mentor who can engage the parents. Especially with young children, the mentor should be closely connected to the school and able to help build a positive relationship between the family and the school community. Training should also help mentors to know about effective strategies for connecting families to needed supports. Consider partnering with your local Mentor affiliate to request technical assistance.
Attendance Works Follow 19, 13, Common sense tells us that students are more likely to attend school when they feel connected to caring adults who notice whether they show up. These caring adults can help students feel hope for a better future and help families secure support for addressing barriers to getting to school.
Quality mentoring, especially as part of a school-wide effort, can be leveraged as a strategy to improve attendance and boost academic achievement, research shows. Chronic absenteeism in kindergarten, and even pre-K, can predict lower test scores, repeated patterns of poor attendance and retention in later grades, especially if the absences persist for more than a year.
Chronic absence is especially challenging for students from low-income communities whose families face greater hurdles to getting to school and have fewer resources to make up for lost learning time. This toolkit is designed to help school districts, particularly the administrators charged with establishing an elementary success mentor program, leverage ideas and resources available from national partner organizations as well as the pioneering work of a growing number of local efforts.
This toolkit is filled with tips, scripts, and a variety of relevant and free materials that you can take and tailor to the needs of your community. What is the elementary success mentor strategy? How do we get started? What does an elementary success mentor do? How do we recruit, screen, train, match, and support success mentors? What support is needed from schools?
What support is needed from the district? Additional Resources. In a trailblazing initiative in New York City, students with a history of chronic absence who received success mentors attended nearly two more weeks of school each year. These same students had better academic outcomes when compared to peers who did not receive support from a caring adult.
See this evaluation by Johns Hopkins University for more information. To print the Executive Summary of Relationships Matter.
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