Uniondale High School mentorship set to return

With the school year well underway, Rhonda Taylor, assistant superintendent of the Uniondale school district, and Pablo Ocampo, assistant principal at the high school, are preparing for the next cohort of mentees in the My Brother’s Keeper Mentor Program.

The program is a way for struggling seniors at Uniondale High to have an extra support system in place to push them to graduation.

“We clearly started out wanting to look for seniors who were struggling to get to the finish line for graduation, and thinking about who could mentor those scholars,” Taylor explained.

The program began last school year, and didn’t get off the ground until April, when the 13 mentees from the high school gathered with nine volunteer mentors at a breakfast to meet one another and exchange phone numbers.

The mentors in the program were “folks who just live in the community,” Taylor said, including firefighters, emergency medical technicians, heads of civic organizations and members of the Hofstra University staff. From April to June, their role was to communicate with the mentees, as well as their teachers and administrators, if needed, to keep them on top of their school responsibilities.

Some mentors tutored their mentees, some offered them support during times of stress, and some even gave them daily wake-up calls, Taylor said, to make sure they made it to school.

“(Mentees) need somebody who can just encourage them to hang in there,” Taylor said. “Whichever way they could get together with them, they were able to do that.”

Ocampo said that all 13 mentees graduated — 11 in June and the other two in August. And all of them were accepted by at least one college, according to Taylor.

Although My Brother’s Keeper was created for young men of color, the mentor program also accepts struggling young women who believe they would benefit from having a mentor. Six of the mentees last year were young women.

The mentees were chosen based on a three-tier system that was implemented last September, Matt Ritter, the district’s assistant superintendent for planning, assessment, data and accountability, explained. The system identifies the students who “need the most social, emotional and academic support” by dividing them into three tiers based on their grades and performance.

“These procedures and tools help us analyze students’ needs and put them into tiers according to how much help they’re going to need to get them across the finish line,” Ritter said. Tier three students get “safety nets” based on their increased needs, including being a part of the mentor program.

This year, all nine original mentors are returning to the program, and more community members have shown interest in joining as well. Mentees have not officially joined yet, but Taylor said she and Ocampo have already identified and met with some seniors who may be a good fit for the program based on their performance from the previous year.

Ocampo said they are planning to get this year’s program started by November, to give the mentors and mentees more time for support and relationship building.

“Now that we’ve already started it last year and we have mentors that are able and willing,” Ocampo said, “we’re ready to start a lot earlier this year.”

“I think we’ll have fewer boys in a situation of possibly not graduating this year because we’re starting so much earlier,” Taylor added.

The National My Brother’s Keeper organization has six national milestones that community chapters are meant to meet, and one of them is Graduating from High School Ready for College and Career. Taylor and Ocampo implemented the mentor program through MBK to help meet that goal.

This program is just one of the initiatives the Uniondale school district has taken to increase the graduation rate, which has been a major district goal. The official graduation rate from the 2023-24 school year will be released later this year, but based on the numbers from the district, it is expected to be over 90 percent for the first time in Uniondale.