Mentors,
Some really great ideas came out of this informal exchange of information.Seniors' counselor from YCHS, Janette Bunn, also attended, and her insights were helpful as well. The notes here are rather telegraphic in form. Hopefully they will serve to jog our memories, so we can further discuss them with the entire mentor/volunteer group at our first ASPIRE meeting of the year. Date for that is still to be determined.
- To avoid having you spend time waiting for students to arrive for their appointments, we discussed pre-scheduling appointments for the following week. This was the method used a few years back. Mentors prepared their students' blue pass slips FOR THE NEXT WEEK before they left school each week. The passes were left with the ASPIRE Coordinator, who delivered them to the Counseling office for distribution on the appropriate day. That means the students should have their passes in hand and be headed your way sort of "automatically." In the past, this has saved considerable "down time" for mentors.
- Since Advisory Class will now be held three times a week rather than daily, there was discussion of mentors meeting with some students on Wednesdays (the day students are dismissed early) between 1:40-3 p.m. Using this time should not overlap with athletic practices and events.
- Should we introduce some role playing to help students with their college (and job) interviews?
- We will have easier access to ASPIRE students' transcripts this year.We added a statement to the new permission forms explaining to students and parents that this information enables Mentors to better guide their Mentees. We stressed that this type of information in kept confidential. Once school gets under way, the Counseling Office will provide us with the transcripts, which will then be housed in each student's file.
- A reminder to all Mentors working with seniors who are serious about earning scholarships: It's been recommended that a student sign up for at least five different search engines to learn about scholarships offered. The goal is for students to apply for 100-150 scholarships. This means they should be completing two to three applications each week!
- A technique that Tresa used in the spring of last year was to have her Senior mentees talk with her Junior mentees. This turned out to be a valuable way for underclassmen to learn from seniors' experiences about what to do and not do their senior year. We're thinking on how to implement this on a larger scale. Your ideas are always welcome!
- We need to reach out to students in classrooms this year. If memory serves, Pam and Lynsi offered to be among the mentors who do brief ASPIRE presentations in classes from time to time. And we can always incorporate the VERY EFFECTIVE "How You Get into College" exercise produced at Linfield College and shared with us by Laura last year.
- Remind students who work with other YC or Intermediate School students, to refer to this as Peer Tutoring on their activities charts, etc. This is a more meaningful term than the standard, Student Aide.
- The plan is to have ASPIRE be an Opt-In program for seniors next year. This year since we have a new permission form designed at the state level, all students need to sign up for ASPIRE. The good news, the new forms were sent out with the materials mailed to seniors prior to registration. About 25 percent of the senior class turned in their ASPIRE forms on registration day. We can hit the ground running!
- We have reminded parents and students at every juncture that ninth-eleventh graders are welcome to sign up for ASPIRE now, but they may not meet with a mentor until second semester; because seniors have so many deadlines, etc. during the fall. We MAY send a reminder letter about this to parents of the younger students, so that everyone is on the same page. Hence, we should attempt to get parents' e-mail addresses during first sessions with a students.
- Possibly have a meet-and-greet event at YC, so parents can meet their student's mentor.
- We will try to be certain that ASPIRE is kept in the loop about all college visits to the school. This means visits planned by other staff members, too.
- A reminder that at private colleges, a high GPA and high SAT scores may generate as much as $5,000 more in financial aid offered by that college. Private colleges also are known to hold Competitive Scholarship Days on their campuses. Encourage students to call the Financial Aid office at their college-of-choice to find out when these will be held and what needs to be done in order to attend one.
- We plan to work with English teachers to incorporate having seniors do a trial run at writing thei college and scholarship application essays.
