Celena Tribby had tears in her eyes thinking about the impact that 32 Winston-Salem State University students will have on her own students at Cook Literacy Model School.
"It only takes one moment to change the trajectory of a child’s life," said Tribby, who is in her second year as principal at Cook.
Students from one of professor Dawn Hicks Tafari’s classes at WSSU will visit with every fourth- and fifth-grader at Cook. The college kids will spend an hour each Thursday with the Cook students until the end of April.
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The WSSU mentors will be assigned two or three Cook students.
The focus of their get-togethers won’t be on grades, reading or any kind of tutoring. Both sets of students will sit down for lunch, talk about what’s going on in their lives and shoot hoops, draw, write in journals or simply hang out.
Such exchanges can be powerful for the kids at Cook, Tribby said.
"It’s taking the time to say, ‘Hey, you matter,’" she said.
Tafari recently brought her students to Cook to meet their mentees. It was a festive occasion, with cheerleaders and drummers from WSSU’s Red Sea of Sound providing the fanfare.
Tafari, an education professor, started the Radical Academic Mentoring Service, or R.A.M.S., in 2017 at Ashley Elementary School. It came out of her desire for students enrolled in her classes — Advancing the Academic and Social Success of Black Males and Advancing the Academic and Social Success of Black Girls — to have hands-on experience with local schoolchildren.
The program paused during the pandemic and is being revived at Cook. Union Baptist Church is a partner in the program, providing transportation for the WSSU students to Cook.
Located in the Boston-Thurmond neighborhood, Cook has an enrollment of about 300 students and is designated by the federal government as a Title 1 school based on the number of economically disadvantaged students.
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At the kickoff, Cook students cheered when they learned that they will get the chance to visit WSSU’s campus at the end of the semester-long program.
"Exposure is everything. I don’t know what I can be if I can’t see it. That’s what mentorship is about," Tafari said. "I know when I was in third- or fourth-grade, college students were amazing to me. They were rock stars. So here I am, bringing a rock star to school."
Ahmoni McLamb, an elementary education major from Clayton, N.C., said her goal is to let her students know that she is in their corner.
"It’ll be just pushing them and letting them know that they can do anything in life, that nobody is judging, and that you have that support," she said.
The school district will evaluate the mentorship program on its effectiveness and may try to replicate it at other schools.
Kimberly Pemberton, the chairwoman of the education department at WSSU, reminded the mentors of the importance of their role in the lives of the Cook children.
"These children will remember the impact you had on their lives," she said. "I want you to take it seriously so that will know that one day they can sit in these seats, be one of these drummers or one of these cheerleaders."
