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Carmel High mentor program pairs incoming ninth-graders with trained upperclassmen to ease transition
Summary
Carmel High School's mentor program, presented at the Oct. 29 Carmel Central School District Board meeting, matches incoming ninth-graders with vetted upperclassmen (about 140 mentors this year), including bilingual mentors, and uses data-driven matching and quarterly check-ins to support students' social and academic transition.
CARMEL, N.Y. — The Carmel Central School District on Oct. 29 highlighted a long-running mentor program designed to help incoming ninth-graders settle into the high school.
Joanne, an English language arts teacher who advises the Mentor Program, told the Board of Education the program began about 2011 and now includes roughly 140 mentors. “Everybody gets a mentor,” she said, describing a process that uses a Microsoft Form QR-code to collect eighth-graders’ hobbies, personality types and mentor requests so staff can make purpose-driven matches.
The program stages orientation a week before school begins, runs a club fair to connect mentees to extracurriculars, and schedules sustained follow-up. Joanne said mentors completed a quarterly questionnaire to ensure they maintained contact and that mentees were supported; mentors also volunteered at 24 district events last year.
The advisor emphasized bilingual capability as a specific strength. She said the mentor roster now lists languages including Ukrainian, Italian, Polish, Filipino, Arabic, Albanian, Turkish, Czech and Spanish so students who arrive as English-language learners can be paired with someone who speaks their language.
Board members praised the program's structure and outcomes. Trustee Wise said the matching process avoids randomness and cultivates lasting relationships; Trustee (vice president) Dahl thanked Joanne for the ‘care’ she invests in students. Trustees described the program as a low-cost, high-impact way to ease students’ academic and social transition.
District officials said the program’s data-driven matching and follow-up checks are intended to help students who report anxiety about the large high school building and more complex schedules. The mentor advisor described examples where shared interests (from bagpipes to horseback riding) created durable mentor–mentee bonds.
Next steps: the board invited mentors and program volunteers to appear before the board for recognition and feedback at a future meeting.
