Mentor Kenosha & Racine Recieve Federal Grant
The U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has awarded the University of Wisconsin-Parkside a nearly half-million dollar grant to expand mentoring services for area middle school students. The 2009 Recovery Act Local Youth Mentoring Grant provides $497,691 to support the university-led Mentor Kenosha & Racine (MKR) partnership.
“This award significantly boosts UW-Parkside’s efforts to help address the educational attainment and academic achievement issues facing local school districts,” said UW-Parkside Chancellor Deborah Ford. “We are committed to partnering with our K-12 colleagues and community leaders to provide area students with the support and guidance they need to fulfill their potential and pursue successful careers."
The grant builds on the sturdy foundation of MKR, a mentoring initiative based at the university's Center for Community Partnerships. MKR trains mentors and professional mentor program staff, certifies quality mentoring programs, and recruits community members to become mentors.
"Middle school is a critical time in a young person's development – it’s a period when a student can easily get lost and turn away from education and turn to gangs or make other poor decisions,” UW-Parkside Community Development & Dialogues Director Mark Gesner said in explaining the grant’s focus on educational attainment and juvenile delinquency prevention. "A trained mentor can support a youth in academics, career development, interpersonal relationships, and much more. Quality mentoring can work wonders. Imagine the value of giving a floundering middle school student a role model to trust and look up to -- that's what we're going to be able to do for many area youth with this grant." ”
Gesner chairs the Mentor Kenosha & Racine Advisory Council. He was the grant proposal’s lead author and will serve as the program's principal investigator.
MKR benefited from a strong partnership effort by 15 community leaders who came together to establish mentoring goals for the region. Key early supporters included the Racine County Workforce Development Center and the United Way of Kenosha County. In 2006, the Workforce Development Center engaged UW-Parkside to conduct research regarding the city of Racine’s low education attainment rates. The study identified mentoring as a key to combating the problem. At the same time, the United Way of Kenosha County held community well-being planning sessions in which mentoring emerged as a fundamental strategy to address various challenges youth were encountering.
School districts in Racine and Kenosha will directly benefit from the grant through the funding support of internal "point persons." They will ensure community support is embedded into the schools in an effective, sustainable manner.
“We have always believed in the power of mentoring, but our efforts have been hampered by not having the staffing infrastructure to administer the program. This grant will dramatically change the situation,” said Kathy Dunkerson, Racine Unified School District’s Director of Extended Day Programs.
Norris Jones, the Minority Academic Affairs Specialist for the Kenosha Unified School District stated, “The Collaborative Student Mentoring Program (CSMP) of the Kenosha Unified School District is pleased to have partnered with Mentor Kenosha & Racine. KUSD earnestly desires to see a significant increase in mentors who volunteer in our middle schools due to Mentor Kenosha & Racine securing this grant.”
The three-year grant couples school-based mentoring during the academic year with community-based mentoring in the summer. Summer mentoring will take place at UW-Parkside's Root River Environmental Education and Community Center in Racine and the Center for Environmental Education, Demonstration, and Applied Research in Kenosha. The emerging science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) employment sector is a focus of grant-supported efforts to be delivered in partnership with the local workforce development centers and area mentoring programs such as Big Brothers Big Sisters.
For information about Mentor Kenosha & Racine and how to become a mentor, visit www.mentorkr.org or contact MKR AmeriCorps*VISTA Program Coordinator Michelle Dolnik at dolnik@uwp.edu or call (262) 595-2652.
