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A Description of a Mentor Program

Mentor Program of California Description 5

In the face of growing disintegration of traditional institutions such as families, churches and community networks, mentoring has emerged as an alternative and inexpensive solution for helping young students (Mejorado). Mentors provide academic assistance and expose at-risk children to positive activities in order to motivate them to succeed at school ("Mentors," 1996, p. 21). The Governor's Academic Volunteer and Mentor Service Program (AVMSP) of California is one of the many programs that have sprung up to enable schools to offer mentors to at-risk students. Every year, the Office of the Secretary for Education (OSE) that runs AVMSP metes out ten million dollars in local assistance grants for recruitment of mentors in various schools. Thus far, this program has providing funding to more than 145 school-based mentor programs in California. Seventeen thousand mentors help around 15,000 to 20,000 students every year (OSE, 2000).

Although the concept of mentoring seems appealing as a cost-efficient strategy, it also involves a labor-intensive and time-consuming process of recruiting, training, matching and supervision of the mentors and mentees. Each step of the process is fraught with problems. Apart from the difficulty of recruiting committed mentors who have the stamina to persist with mentees, the absence of a standard criterion for this process leads to confusion and a lack of direction (Mejorado). In this paper, the AVMSP will be described and evaluated to assess its impact on students and school counseling practices, with a focus on schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

Mentor programs have been created all over the United States in a bid to reduce school dropout rates and boost academic performance (Murray, 1995, p. 1). Most researchers have obtained encouraging results in their studies, but emphasized that good mentors are vital to the success of the ...

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A Description of a Mentor Program. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:18, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1687154.html