Wood Middle School Mentor Program

Montgomery County’s Task Force on Mentoring will help celebrate January as Mentoring Month with a special one-day program for students at Earle B. Wood Middle School in Rockville. The students will be mentored on Tuesday, Jan. 29, through the combined efforts of volunteers from the Task Force, County Council staff and the City of Rockville’s Community Services Office.

The program will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the County Council Office Building located at 100 Maryland Ave. in Rockville.

To help celebrate Mentoring Month in 2012, a similar program involved Richard Montgomery High School students.

“Throughout the year, the programs of the Task Force on Mentoring have a wide variety of goals,” said John Smith of the Task Force. “The programs aim to help students focus on their current school work, they stress to the students the importance of attending college or a technical school and we teach them the value of having internships that would expose them to the workplace. For this special program on Jan. 29, our on-site labs are the offices of the County Council.”

County Council staff members have volunteered as mentors to students for the day. Wood Middle School administrators will select students for participation.

County Council staff will share with the students details on the function of the Council, their specific jobs, qualifications for jobs in government; how they got their jobs; past work experiences that led to their current position and their educational backgrounds. They will try to recommend paths that the students may want to follow to achieve their career goals.

In personal discussions, students will be encouraged to talk about the subjects they are taking; their grades; their subject matter likes/dislikes; subjects they need to take for high school graduation; their knowledge of college; and their career goals.

Mentors have been trained to discuss with the students the importance of concentrating on their current school work; to make sure they are aware of qualifications for high school graduation; and for starting early in regard to their future education plans.

The mentoring experience will not end with the one-day program. Students will be assigned projects to complete based on their experiences and will share those experiences with other students.

The Task Force on Mentoring and Earle B. Wood school administrators are planning other follow-up experiences based on the student projects.

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