Mentoring for Success: SFUSD Student Mentor Expansion for Youth with Disabilities

The Mentoring for Youth with Disabilities Initiative builds upon the foundation of evidence-based practices for effective mentoring and encourages communities to implement and enhance mentoring programs for youth with disabilities. These mentoring efforts will integrate best practices and proven principles into mentoring service models, including efforts to systematically recruit, train, and support mentors in their efforts to encourage individual youth to maximize personal strengths and to develop compensatory skills in specific areas of disability. This program authorized by the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011, Pub. L. 112-110.

San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) proposes "Mentoring for Success," a collaborative project to enhance and expand the SFUSD Student Mentor Program to serve youth with disabilities. SFUSD aims to reach 195 youth with emotional disturbances, attention disorders, or learning disabilities with behavioral elements that place them at-risk of delinquency, truancy, and negative behaviors. SFUSD will also train 195 mentors in best practices for mentoring youth with disabilities. Finally, SFUSD will link mentoring to a collaborative city-wide system for youth with disabilities. The SFUSD Student Mentor Program is a research-validated, school-based model. Project activities include: 1) one-to-one mentoring relationships sustained for 1+ years; 2) significant mentor training, support, and oversight; 3) structured group activities and mentor/family activities; and 4) linkages to community services such as mental health, after-school programs, and parent education. SFUSD's goals are to reduce youth delinquency, truancy, disciplinary problems, and other negative behaviors among youth with disabilities; and to build community capacity for supporting youth with disabilities.
CA/NCF