By Deacon James N. Dunbar
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — In 2003 when chronic, long-standing dropout rates were impacting New Bedford and Fall River schools, a partnership involving business, faith and education leaders responded with a mentoring system that is keeping students in the classroom through graduation.
Today, SMILES, is serving several area communities, helping them to turn the corner on their socio-economic woes by offering students the potential for productive and fulfilling lives.
“What SMILES does is to help students who are identified as ‘in need’ by pairing them with a caring responsible adult mentor, who offers them guidance, support and encouragement,” said Marie Rivera, program manager.
Currently the initiative has 600 volunteer mentors involved in 25 area public schools in New Bedford, Fall River, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Norton, and newly in Westport.
“Each mentor is committed to spending an hour a week in a school during one academic year with a student or in a group — in various grades — being a positive role model or friend,” Rivera added.
They are not a parent, or legal guardian nor social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist.
And while few are professional teachers, there are graduate students in education from UMass-Dartmouth, who are currently among the mentors.
Although there is a “faith” sector of the local partnership — the Council of Churches — that founded SMILES, and most of the current mentors are Catholics, mentors “don’t teach religion, or academics, but may be involved coaching students in grades one and two to read better in our literacy program,” Rivera explained.
“However, there is often a very close relationship that is formed by the mentors that finds the young student seeing the mentor as someone they aspire to be like,” she added.
Lynn Poyant, assistant director of SMILES, said “I’m awed by how much the mentors give of themselves to help others. I watch them deliver so much care and concern. It’s wonderful and humbling to see them draw from their beliefs and philosophies, without any thought of the sacrifices I know they’re making to accomplish the goal.”
While there are few clergy or religious currently in SMILES, Father John M. Sullivan, pastor of St. Patrick’s Parish in Wareham, said that having been a mentor in the SMILES initiative for two years “was interesting, challenging, and offered the opportunity to demonstrate how personal stewardship can involve a wider community than just the parish.”
For the school years of 2006 through 2008 he mentored a seventh- and eighth-grade male student at Normandin Junior High School in New Bedford.
“As a priest and pastor, it was too difficult to be committed to morning classes, so my hour each week was done at the school in its after-school program,” he said.
“The guidance involved what the young man might follow as his secular vocation and what his career goals or profession might be, and what he would do to realized his potentials, his goals,” Father Sullivan explained.
He said that the youth, whose family was immigrant Portuguese, and Catholic, “already had a good support system at home and understood the need for education for their son to be successful and live a fruitful life. But the teen years are challenging, and I think the SMILES program in providing mentors for a whole range of topics — including reading skills — is very important and beneficial.”
Having a priest in the mentoring initiative also proved fruitful “in a sense bringing God into the wider community.”
“Sometimes the time was spent within a group setting and the presence of a priest showed how clergy can effectively use their God-given talents and treasures outside the confines of their parish. That contribution — one might call it a kind of almsgiving we’re asked to practice in Lent — was seen, and appreciated.”
He said there were many Catholics among the mentors he worked with, “all giving of their time and skills in pairing with students with various needs, all contributing to better school attendance, grades, behavior and preventing school dropouts.”
For retired Holy Union Sister Ruth Curry, who lives at The Landmark in Fall River, being a mentor to a shy, first grader at the Green Elementary School in Fall River, who has a problem learning to read, “is right up my alley,” she told The Anchor.
“I taught reading to first graders at Holy Name School in Fall River for 15 years, and so I’m in my experience field and being myself in mentoring,” she said.
“It demands patience, which is a virtue, and I have always been a patient person. Besides helping my student to read better, I hope and pray she will develop the patience she finds in me. It will prove very helpful throughout her lifetime.”
To volunteer or to seek information call Elizett Pires at 508-999-9300, email epires@smilesmentoring.org.