Mentoring is not a new concept for Alabama Baptists. Throughout the state, churches have been pairing caring adults with youth who need remedial help with schoolwork for years. Individual members often volunteer through community-based and school-based programs when their churches don’t have organized tutorials.
“We have been at this long enough that we have our first student graduating from college this year,” said Jane Ferguson, director of community ministries at First Baptist Church, Montgomery.
Once a week for 13 years, church vans have picked up first through sixth graders at Tulane Court Housing Community and brought them back to the church for snacks, Bible stories, devotional time and an hour of one-on-one tutoring in basic academic subjects such as reading, writing and math. Numbers vary from year to year, but the program has had as many as 60 students at one time. This year there are 37 students and 37 tutors.
“The biggest value of our program is the one-on-one relationships formed between students and their tutors,” said Ferguson, who designed the program at First, Montgomery, and helped set it up. Current co-directors are Linda Montgomery, a private-school librarian, and Beau Cooper, a local attorney.
“We tell volunteers up front it’s more a mentoring program than a tutoring program, and the relationship is more important than anything we teach these kids,” Ferguson said.
Each volunteer commits to buy his or her student a birthday gift and a Christmas gift. But these volunteers go way beyond gift-giving. Many of them take their students to church, cheer them on at their ballgames, talk with their teachers and have lunch with their students at school.
“They become involved in their students lives,” Ferguson said. “They become encouragers. A lot of these kids just need people to cheer them on and affirm them, to know somebody cares if they make a good or bad grade.”
As a result, students’ grades have come up and volunteers have seen positive changes in their attitudes and in their behavior.
“It’s extremely hard to measure your success,” Ferguson said.
A low-budget program because of the volunteers and donations, Ferguson estimates that the church spends no more than $1,000 a year on mentoring, including refreshments and the school supplies.
“We have a shoe box for each child containing pens, pencils, crayons, notebook paper, notebooks, folders and other supplies they need at school,” Ferguson said.
“Through the church’s Caring Center, where financial, food and clothing assistance are provided for people in need, we get a lot of educational materials and books donated,” she said. “So we have a lot of free books the children can take home to read.”
Adding another layer to their mentoring program, the church recently developed a program for young fathers in the Tulane Court community who aren’t taking responsibility for their children. That program is funded by a $60,000 grant administered through the Montgomery Step Foundation on Mentoring, an ecumenical group of 26 churches that work together in the nine public housing communities in Montgomery.
“We already had a GED program for them that meets four mornings a week, but with this new Fathers Initiative Program we provide their lunch, and they stay in the afternoon for life-skills training,” Ferguson said. “That can be anything from how to do a job interview to how to manage your anger. We also have an abstinence coach who spends 30 minutes a day with them.
“This program is for boys 16 years old and up, and most are in their teens,” Ferguson said. “Some are fathers, some we’re trying to prevent from becoming fathers. Some of them are referred to us by the courts. It’s a perfect example of how faith-based ministries can and do work.”
First, Montgomery, has adopted Tulane Court Housing Community, and the mentoring programs are just a few of the ways the former works with the latter.
In a similar fashion, Wilsonville Baptist Church in Shelby County adopted the local elementary school this past summer, making theirs more than a tutoring program, too.
“We wanted to be more hands-on in missions, and we decided before we take a trip across an ocean, we should do missions here at home,” explained Deborah Crompton, who directs the program. “We’re a small community, and the school touches all of us in one way or another. So we contacted Debbie Snyder, director of church and community ministries for the Shelby Association, and she provided training for us.”
For eight years Dot Brimer taught adults how to read as a volunteer for the Learn to Read Council, a nonprofit literacy program in Athens.
Two years ago she began tutoring elementary school children through RSVP, a senior volunteer center. Last October she became a volunteer for the Athens City School At-Risk Program.
Twice a week Brimer goes to the Athens Intermediate School and spends about 45 minutes helping a sixth-grader with his reading skills. Her pupil has been held back at least one grade, maybe two, because of reading problems. In fact, he didn’t want to go to school for a while, a behavior that his teachers attributed to embarrassment about his reading.
“His teacher said he’s improving, that he came up a grade level on a recent reading test, although he’s still way behind,” said Brimer, who is WMU director at Southside Baptist Church in Athens.
“He’s a very likeable kid. I hope I’m helping him,” Brimer said.
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