UPDATED APRIL 26, 2009

Program Needs State Support
Reflections from First Mentor Class | Saving One Teacher at a Time

FIRST TEAM OF MENTORS (FRONT) Georgia Dunn (Ohio), Dianne Gum (Colorado) and Bill Flechtner (Oregon); (MIDDLE) Sandy Jacoby (Wisconsin), Nancy Becker (Wisconsin) and Mary Anne McCloud (Colorado); (BACK) Katy Gray (Colorado), Carla Harris (Oregon), Linda Drake (Kansas) and Wayne Dunn (Ohio). Photo by Julie E. Dodd.

History

With the vision of supporting new journalism teachers across the nation, the JEA Board, at its July board meeting in the summer of 2007, established a mentoring program, creating a Mentoring Committee and committing $90,000 over three years to train mentors.

By providing an ongoing support system to improve the retention rate of new journalism teachers, we hope that new advisers in this program
will stay with their publications and build them into strong, effective programs that promote JEA’s goals of freedom of expression, responsible journalism, and support for diversity.

Here’s how it started:

At the Denver convention, representatives of scholastic press associations discussed their concerns about the high turnover of new advisers and the impending retirement of many outstanding journalism educators.

As Julie Dodd said, “We realized that the retired advisers had the expertise, the more flexible time schedule and the love of journalism to help make the mentoring program work.” So, a key part of the program is identifying and training retired journalism teachers to serve as mentors.

Here’s how it will work:

The funding provided by JEA will enable the selected mentors to attend mentor training workshops at our national conventions. Five states will begin the mentoring program, with two mentors from each state. New states will be added each year.

The mentors will be asked to

• Participate in two training sessions this year – at the Philadelphia and Anaheim conventions.
  
• Use the mentoring process that they will learn during the training.
• Give a two-year commitment to the program. By the second year, they will train other mentors in their states to extend the outreach of the program.
• Mentor at least two mentees this year. By the second year, they will take on one or two more mentees.
• Collect data and prepare reports to establish the effectiveness of the program. Results will be used to solicit funding for extending the program. The Mentoring Committee will be working to develop funding partnerships and will apply for grants to expand the program.

The five states that have obtained state-level support required to become part of the JEA mentoring program are Wisconsin, Ohio, Oregon, Kansas and Colorado. Their support comes from both scholastic and professional press associations to provide stipends for mentors, registration fees for state conferences, free memberships, scholarships for mentees to new adviser workshops, etc.

Committee

Here’s who we are:

• Linda Barrington, co-chair – JEA’s liaison with the National Council of Teachers of English
• Julie Dodd, co-chair – professor in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida and JEA’s liaison with scholastic press association directors
• Nick Ferentinos –coordinator of the California Scholastic Journalism Initiative Mentor Program and instructor in the New Teacher Center’s mentoring program
• Peggy Gregory – journalism teacher, mentor and newspaper adviser at Greenway High School, Phoenix
• Norma Kneese – journalism teacher and newspaper, yearbook and photography adviser at Snake River High School, Blackfoot, Idaho, and chair of the JEA Multicultural Commission
• Steve O’Donoghue – director of the California Scholastic Journalism Initiative
• Candace Perkins Bowen –JEA LISTSERV coordinator, director of the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University

Program Needs State Support
Reflections from First Mentor Class | Saving One Teacher at a Time