Amboy schools to pilot new student mentor program

AMBOY – The Regional Office of Education No. 47 is piloting a new student mentor program at Amboy Junior High School and Amboy High School during the 2024-25 school year that could help it and other districts ultimately find ways to improve student behavior, grades and attendance.

Modeled after the same program that ROE No. 35 piloted in Mendota’s elementary and middle school last year, it’s a program that the ROE hopes will help school districts as they grapple with how to help students who are struggling academically, have frequent disciplinary issues, are having trouble making friends and/or have poor attendance.

Amboy School District 272 Superintendent Joshua Nichols believes the program will drastically improve the three target areas of student behavior, grades and attendance. To make that happen, student mentors Kaya Stringer and Abbie Holldorf will work with students in grades five to 12 who have been identified by school staff as at risk, ROE 47 Regional Superintendent Chris Tennyson said in an interview with Shaw Local.

The mentoring program for many years has been on the minds of administration at ROE 47, which serves Lee, Ogle and Whiteside counties. They saw it implemented successfully at schools throughout Cook County and began considering whether this was something they could bring to their school districts, Tennyson said.

Schools in Cook County receive guidance and resources from intermediate service centers rather than a regional office of education because of the county’s large size. The county, excluding the city of Chicago, is divided into three regions – North Cook, South Cook and West 40 – that each has its own service center, according to the Illinois Board of Education website.

For many years, all three of those service centers have offered their school districts this mentorship program. It was modeled out of the IBOE’s Alternative Learning Opportunities Programs, which recognizes that some students need extra support services that are not provided by standard school programs and provides grant funding for schools to implement a mentor program, according to the IBOE website.

About two years ago, Tennyson, along with ROE 35 Superintendent Chris Dvorak and Assistant Superintendent Ryan Myers, got the opportunity to tour schools in Cook County at which the program was being used and met with the student mentors, Tennyson said.

After seeing how positive of an influence the program had on the students there, Dvorak and Myers decided to pilot the program in one of ROE 35′s school districts, and Tennyson said he was going to see how it went.

The Regional Office of Education 35, which serves LaSalle, Marshall and Putnam counties, tested out the program at Northbrook Middle School and Lincoln Elementary School in Mendota during the 2023-24 school year, Dvorak said in an interview with Shaw Local.

ROE 35 placed three mentors at Northbrook Middle School who each worked with 25 to 32 students in grades five to eight, NMS Principal Paula Daley said.

Similar to what Amboy is doing now, Northbrook targeted attendance, grades and behavior as major issues for the mentors to work on with students. It was a group effort at the school to select the students who needed the most help in those areas, Daley said.

Together, Northbrook’s social worker, counselor, grade-level teachers and school administration went through each grade level and picked out students who were struggling the most in those three target areas, she said. Because they had three mentors, they ended up having a few open spots, so they chose students who they thought could use a confidence boost or another person to confide in, Daley said.

“There were kids who were like, ‘I’m not interested,’ and there were kids who begged to be in it,” Daley said.

At the beginning of the school year, the administration set up brief one-on-one meetings with students and their assigned mentors. From there, the program took off on its own, she said.

The mentors made themselves very visible in the school, as they were always in the hallways or in the lunchroom talking to the kids, Daley said.

For students struggling academically, a mentor went with to classes with which they were having a hard time. The mentor also would stay after school with the student to help them with their homework and make sure it was done before the student went home, Daley said.

If the student had low attendance, the mentor established communication with the parents and worked with them to find a solution. For some kids, that meant the mentor would drive them to and from school if the parents were unable to, Daley said.

Some of the students had repeated disciplinary issues, and the mentor was able to prevent problems from occurring because they would talk to the student about any stressors or emotional issues that may be causing them to act out. If a problem did occur, the mentor would step in and talk it out with the student before it was brought to administration, Daley said.

“They really changed our world here,” Daley said.

The mentors freed up a lot of the staff members’ time to focus on other things they needed to do to run a school, such as coordinating athletics or class curriculum, she said.

“It was really, really nice to have somebody affiliated with your school but not affiliated with the school,” she said.

Without the involvement of the principal or a teacher, the students were able to open up to the mentors and get the help they needed in a casual atmosphere. Especially for students who needed help but who might not qualify for something such as a case manager or social worker, the mentors became that middle ground, Daley said.

As the 2023-24 school year came to a close, ROE 35 administration presented details at Illinois Valley Community College about the influence of the program in Mendota.

At Northbrook Middle School, there were many students who were bound for summer school who did not end up there because of how much their grades had improved. There were students who were absent for about 30% of the school year who began regularly attending classes and, overall, the school had a fewer number of disciplinary issues, Daley said.

“What turned out funny is, at the end of the year, the kids who didn’t have a mentor were coming in and asking how they could get one,” Daley said. “It was that great of a program.”

Administration at ROE 47 – after seeing ROE 35′s presentation and touring the schools in Mendota to see the mentors in action – decided to give the program a try within their district. They selected Amboy because of its close proximity to Mendota and got to work on the hiring process, Tennyson said.

Stringer and Holldorf both have a substitute teaching license and bachelor’s degrees in areas such as psychology, social work and counseling, he said.

Nichols, Amboy’s superintendent, was present during all of the hiring interviews and said that his biggest decision-making factor was the candidates’ willingness and experience working with kids.

“It takes a special person [to work with kids],” Nichols said, “They’re going to do things and say things that’s different from working with adults.”

At Amboy, the biggest issues that the school is experiencing are low attendance, poor academic performance and frequent behavioral problems, Nichols said.

Both Nichols and Tennyson identified the effect of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic as the root cause of the schools’ current problems. For the past two years, students, teachers and staff have done a great job trying to catch up, Tennyson said.

It has gotten better, but some students still are behind a year and a half or more, he said.

“Those brief years [of remote learning] changed everything for them,” Nichols said, “I think social-emotional learning and teaching kids and everybody how to kind of behave in public has taken on more of an importance.”

During the student speeches at the 2023-24 graduation ceremonies for Amboy Junior High School and Amboy High School, both classes spoke about how much remote learning affected them, Nichols said.

Stringer and Holldorf will start work in Amboy’s high school and middle school on Aug. 12. Taking advice from Mendota’s school staff, Nichols said, the first few days will be spent getting the mentors acquainted with the building, administration and teachers.

As the year goes on, Nichols hopes the mentors will become another positive role model in the students’ lives.

After the first semester of school and again at the end of the year, administration at Amboy and ROE 47 are going to look at the three target areas – behavior, grades and attendance – to determine the program’s success, Tennyson said.

Based on those results, Tennyson hopes to eventually expand the program to other schools in ROE 47′s service area.