Mentoring program changing lives in NYC school

Students from Binghamton City School District have expressed how a recent mentoring program is making so much impact in their lives.

“Binghamton City School District is the public school district for the city of Binghamton, New York. As of 2021 about 5,000 students in total were enrolled in the district. In the 2017 and 2018 school years, 60% of students were minorities, and slightly more than half were eligible for free or reduced lunch,” source: Wikipedia.

A volunteer at Binghamton City School District mentoring program, Miss Janet, hopes and promise to make as much impact in the lives of these kids through the program.

Speaking on the impact from Miss Janet, eight-grader Hayleigh Scofield said: “I get to just talk to someone every week, and I’ve kind of grown up with her because I’ve been talking to Miss Janet since the third grade. She’s kind of like a grandma to me.

“It (the monitoring program) makes me also want to make sure that everybody’s included because it reminds me that it’s important because I have a role model to show me that it’s important.”

Janet Denman, another volunteer for the project said: “Somebody who’s a retired teacher told me about this, and she said it’s just one hour a week, and you get to work individually with one student and I thought, oh, that seems like it would be quite interesting.

“I see people in different situations, what their situations are, the difficulties that people have.”

Mary Ann Dorner runs the program and any student is welcome to join. Kids typically eat lunch with their mentor and just talk about daily life.

For the kids in the mentoring program, role models mean everything to them. While the program is growing, leaders say more mentors are needed.