Friday, April 17

The Kick-Off Mentoring Program Kick's Off for the 2015-2016 School Year by Rebekah Fleck

A small fish in a big sea. That is what you could say about freshmen entering high school for the first time. Incoming freshmen at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School (OHCHS) Don’t have to feel like such a small fish anymore, thanks to John Springer and Paul Bickford. A couple years ago Springer and Bickford attended a conference, at which the founder of a program called the Kick-Off Mentoring program talked about his national program.
When asked about the program Springer said, “It is a mentoring program where Juniors and seniors basically get the power for doing freshman orientation and meet with freshman and meet with them in CBA, so they are called kick-off mentors and they really get to be sort of upper class leaders in the building; leading freshman about what they need to know, like if they were a student coming in as a freshman what would they had liked to know and how would they have liked to been helped.So they really try to sort of watch over them and there’s a connection that a freshman has in the building.”
Springer and Bickford were in talks about this program for a couple of years and about doing it, they just had to figure out how to fit it into the school budget and how to rearrange it around our school’s setup.
Although Springer and Bickford are administratively helping, the teacher coordinator Michael Morell, a science teacher at OHCHS. Springer and Bickford will be playing a big part in the Kick-Off Mentoring program the first year, especially getting its feet off from the ground. Morell said, “I really want it to be successful because I think the freshman orientation mold we have now is broken and we need to put life into it and get the freshman excited to come to school, not just another day where they are going to sit down and be talked at.”
The Kick-Off Mentoring program will begin during the 2015-2016 school year. In this program each Junior and Senior who participates will be assigned 4-5 freshman. Every single incoming freshman will have a mentor.

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