Mentors Care

MENTORSHIP FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS CONSIDERED "AT-RISK"
Mentors Care has positively impacted the lives of hundreds of high school students in North Texas since its founding by Dena Petty in 2009. Mentors care provides caring adult mentors who meet with students on campus each week to help guide, encourage, and inspire students to reach for a brighter future by graduating from high school.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY "AT-RISK"?
The term "at-risk" is used in education to identify students who may not graduate from high school due to varying predictive indicators to include:

Low attendance
Poor academic performance
Held back from advancing to the next level
Pregnant or is a parent
Placed in an alternative education program
Expelled from school
On probation or in community service
Economic hardships
Homelessness
And more

Most of these students considered to be at-risk have social and emotional needs that school educators and administrators are not equipped or staffed to address. As a result, students become overwhelmed and drop out due to hopelessness. The overall lack of coping skills plaguing high school students facing these hardships presents a major barrier to their academic success.

These students have the highest impact on our high school dropout rate. At this time, one in five (1 in 5) Texas high school students drop out before graduating while, of the same token, 65% of all jobs in the United States require post-secondary education.

MENTORS CARE IS A PROVEN SOLUTION
The program helps approximately 700 at-risk students across the fifteen schools we serve. Our personalized relationships with school partners are really important because teachers and administrators refer struggling students to us for the program. Our professional onsite coordinators then interview referred students to ensure they are a good fit and truly want to enter the program. It is all voluntary. 

Most high school mentoring programs do not succeed due to various reasons. 

But Petty's Mentors Care program has experienced AMAZING success. In fact:

100% of Seniors in our Program GRADUATED last year
77% of Students Progressed/Maintained Credits
73% of students improved/maintained ATTENDANCE
*Percentages represent students enrolled in our program for at least 2 yrs.

51% of students in the program for any length of time were connected with COMMUNITY ASSISTANCE through our program

Our Needs

There are so many more students who could greatly benefit from our program who sit on our waiting list each school year and some schools haven't heard of our program so we can help their at-risk student population.

STAFF MEMBER SUPPORT
School counselors are extremely overburdened with caseloads too large to manage and even Mentors Care's coordinators are stretched to capacity to meet caseloads often exceeding 55-76 students per coordinator in each school. Our coordinators all have ever-increasing roles and responsibilities with the recent expansion. Being able to hire additional coordinators will help us assist more at-risk students with even more focused attention on each student. 

PROGRAM GROWTH & EXPANSION
Our mentorship program currently operates within 15 Ellis, Dallas, and Taylor County high schools: Advantage Academy, Avalon, Ennis, Ferris, Italy, Life High School Oak Cliff, Maypearl, Midlothian, Midlothian Heritage, Milford, Palmer, Red Oak, Waxahachie, and Wylie (Abilene) high schools. 

Our waiting lists are growing, we need more mentors, snacks and school supplies, water, and staff support so we can actively recruit potential volunteer mentors.

This program works and is changing lives!! And our vision is to expand our services to more schools to help more at-risk kids.