Monday, October 15, 2007

TRAINING COMPLETE!

Tonight, we completed our training. The focus was on the "advocating" portion of the program. The major pitfall is assuming the role of the parent and trying to solve all of the parent-student-school issues as a mentor. Our discussions and exercises produced some very frank views and people were comfortable enough with each other to not pull any punches.

Clearly, we have an excellent school system but the perception is that all students are not served as well as some others. One person mentioned that sometimes parents of color go to the school and are treated as invisible. Our role as mentor-advocates is to help, and that was a useful discussion because we could see the lines we didn't want to cross.

I've attended lots of training programs but I must say that these hours with Graig Meyer and Lori Clark were some of the most productive and well structured of a lot of former training sessions.

In a couple of weeks we will get to meet our mentees. I do not plan to Blog about it, but later on I might share some of my "lessons learned" and significant experiences.

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