RAMBLER FEATURE: Mentors Extend Helping Hand to Selected Students at School

Community members, schoolteachers and staff are volunteering their time to mentor young people who need a helping hand to keep up with classmates or to ease anxieties some kids have in dealing with group activities and personal relationships.

At Rose Hill Elementary, Virginia State Trooper Darius Henry comes from his home in Woodbridge to spend time with a student he first met two years ago and who now has become a kind of celebrity to all his 6th grade classmates when Trooper Henry shows up in full uniform to have lunch or when he joins in during recess or rides along as a chaperone on a field trip to the Baltimore Aquarium.

Henry, who is 30 years old and has two kids of his own, wants students to see police as real people and not someone to fear. “[Mentoring] has a positive effect on me too,” he says. “When I walk in and the kids go crazy, it helps me out. I see a lot of bad things in my job. It’s nice to have brighter things to think about.”

At Twain Middle School, Samantha Vivian-Beck runs a program called R.i.S.E. (Respect. Inspire. Strive. Educate.) that pairs selected students with teachers and school staff who then engage in planned extracurricular activities, such as a scavenger hunt, escape room, or potluck dinner, at least once a month during the school year.

“In my second year at Twain Middle School, I saw that there were lots of students who struggled behaviorally and socially and that their struggles impacted their ability to participate in after school clubs and events,” Samantha explained. “The RiSE mentoring program gives those students a better sense of community which in turn allows them to build stronger relationships with peers and adults.”

Samantha would like to see the program she started at Twain expanded to other schools. “If Fairfax County Public Schools had the resources to enable me to do RiSE full time for the county, I would jump at the chance as I fully believe in its viability.”

At Edison High School, a new mentoring program that matches students with each other has recently been launched and Tiffany McVicker, a student who was mentored at Twain, says she looks forward to joining the program next year. “RiSE really helped me,” she said.

Martha Macdonald, a mentoring specialist with the Fairfax County Public Schools, says approximately 3,000 community members and school staff are currently involved in mentorships with roughly 4,000 students throughout the county. The number of community mentors fell off sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic, Macdonald notes. “I lost 800+ trained and vetted mentors who never returned after schools reopened,” she said. “Many of them moved geographically or moved onto another worthy cause.”

Anyone interested in becoming a mentor can contact Martha at the Office of Student Safety and Wellness at 571-230-3596.