Lincoln Public Schools Tri-Mentoring Partnership

Lincoln Public Schools (LPS) proposes to build a Tri-Mentoring Partnership (TMP) in Lincoln, Nebraska. The target population will include an increase of 160 Latino, Native American, and African American students at Culler, Lefler, Park, Irving, Dawes, and Goodrich Middle School. LPS will work collaboratively with TeamMates of Lincoln (school-based model), Heartland Big Brothers Big Sisters (community-based model), LAMP (parent engagement), as well as targeted business, cultural centers, and faith-based organizations in an effort to serve high risk youth. The project will be for at least 3 years with long-term sustainability across the community. The major goals of the program are to build the capacity of each of the programs by forming an IS-member TMP Advisory Board which will implement a collective strategic planning process and update it yearly for the three-year grant. The program will focus on collective asset building to increase the number of youth served for each group, and will also launch a public awareness campaign; activate TMP to help close the achievement gap by improving academic performance at the six middle schools; improve cultural competency for mentor-student matches with advanced mentor trainings; enhance and expand the Latino parent engagement model; pilot applicable elements of the Latino parent engagement model with Native American and African American students in years two and three of the project; host staff development sessions for school staff about mentoring as an effective intervention; improve mentor recruitment/retention to increase the success for Lincoln youth by; improve mentor recruitment through a targeted mentor recruitment strategy; expand the Latino parent engagement model; improve mentor retention by providing match support; improve student attendance (40%), academic performance (20%), and behavior (20%); and improve the monitoring of mentor-student matches in the Lincoln Public Schools. CA/NCF