Grandpa Camp and Thrive Chelan Valley team up to serve MOE students

CHELAN – Representatives of the Grandpa Project, Thrive Chelan Valley and Morgen Owings Elementary met in an informal session on Dec. 17 to discuss the future mentoring program for third grade students at Morgen Owings Elementary (MOE).

School and Community Liaison and founder of Thrive Sarah Barnes, opened the discussion. “I see my job as bringing the resources of the community to kids … caring people is the best resource our community has,” said Barnes.

Barnes informed that she is always seeking opportunities to make those relationships happen. So when she met Rod Brooks of the Grandpa Project she was excited.

“I think you have no idea, what legacy you might leave behind for a student in the schools,” said Barnes as she thanked the five grandpas who attended the meeting.

After moving to Chelan from the East Coast and from Bellingham, Associate Principal at MOE Todd Hausmann noticed that there are fewer resources in the community to meet the diverse needs of students.

“It’s going to take all us in the small town of Chelan to work together and help kids with what they need,” said Hausmann.

He recalls his first conversations with Mentoring Program Director Tori Carpenter and Barnes about mentoring opportunities at MOE and being thrilled for the kids.

Hausmann shared a few statistics from MOE, “We have a school population that really is hurting in a lot of different ways … 60 percent of our students are Hispanic, 70 percent of our students qualify for free and reduce programs … two thirds of our students are living at or below the poverty level, 52 percent of our population is male … we have a lot of single parent homes, 13 percent of the students come from migrant families. A lot of families are disconnected from their extended families who live in other parts of the country, maybe live in another country or some are deceased. “

Hausmann and all staff at MOE care deeply about all kids in the community and want to provide a helping hand.

Early in the Fall, a one-on-one mentoring program was started at MOE. “We have been able to place five students with a one-on-one mentor … we have 600 kids, that’s a very low percentage of our student population that is benefiting from the mentoring program,” said Hausmann.

So far, he has seen how much those five students have benefited from the program. “It makes such a positive difference when their mentors show up.”

Now Hausmann has a list with 15 -20 names of students teachers want mentors for. “When Sarah mentioned Rod and connected me with the Grandpa Project, it was an obvious win-win … this vision that you have for the Grandpa Project can work in conjunction with our one-on-one mentoring program to bring more people into the school and provide that very special touch in the lives of kids,” Hausmann explained.

Carpenter and Brooks went ahead and described the new pilot program, Grandpas in the Classroom.  

“Our mission is to enable every child to have an experience with a grandpa and benefit from that … we want to have a male presence in each classroom,” said Brooks.

The goal is to have each grandpa matched up with a teacher and classroom by February. “There’s only four months of the school year after that, so if we have five people and four months, it means we will have 20 visits at a minimum,” explained Brooks.

The four month period will serve as a learning curve. “If it works as well as our design is intended to, we’ll like to be able to roll this out to multiple grade levels … right now it’s very limited we would like to have one in every third grade class and just enjoy the opportunities that come from that.”

The volunteer grandpa will be expected to be in the classroom at least for one hour a month and be involved in some type of activity. For example Carpenter, suggested to spend time doing crafts or perhaps reading a story to the class.

Carpenter will work on putting together an orientation day and a meet-and-greet for the grandpas and teachers to introduce themselves sometime in January.

After the end of the four months, the grandpas and the team will gather up to discuss their experience with the program and make a few tweaks to it.

The major goal is to have a grandpa in each classroom in the Valley.

If you are a grandpa interested in taking part of the pilot program contact Tori Carpenter at tori@thrivechelanvalley.com or (509)901-6155.