The New Hanover County AIG Student Mentorship Program is a unique opportunity for highly motivated high school students to make a meaningful impact in our community. Through this program, high-achieving high school mentors will be paired with an AIG (academically or intellectually gifted) middle or elementary school mentee. During bi-weekly one-on-one meetings, mentors will build relationships with their mentees while guiding them through logic puzzles and other activities that require them to think critically and creatively. These relationships are designed to stimulate curiosity, provide support, and foster both academic and personal growth. Additionally, this program will allow high school students to volunteer meaningfully and impact their mentee’s life while also supplementing our community’s gifted specialists.
Our mission is to empower gifted individuals with the tools to grow both academically and personally while providing meaningful leadership experiences to highly motivated high school students.
In a typical meeting, mentors and mentees will play a game or complete some sort of activity together. These activities are designed to stimulate critical thinking or improve the student's collaborative skills while still allowing them the opportunity to interact with their mentor. The goal of these activities is to foster a connection between the mentor and mentee so that when the mentee needs guidance or support they will feel comfortable enough with their mentor to go to them for it.
At the most basic level, this program’s ability to support the students that it mentors is reliant on the quality of the relationship between the mentor and mentee. It will be each mentor’s job to make that relationship the best it can be so that when their mentee needs guidance or advice with something, the mentor will be able to offer guidance and support.
We have high school mentors come to meet with their buddies at their feeder elementary or middle schools. This will reduce travel time and costs for the mentors as well as create more of a connection between the mentors and mentees because they might even see each other in the halls when they are in high school themselves.
Each high school will have its own leadership team made up of two to three students who will coordinate with volunteers from their school and with the school that they are serving. In addition to this, there will be a county leadership council made up of the leadership teams from each high school plus the president of the program, vice presidents, and other positions that are not exclusive to a single school such as the social media coordinator. This structure will ensure that each school we serve gets the individual attention from our leadership that it needs which wouldn’t be possible without delegating responsibilities to smaller teams. Additionally, it will allow the central leadership to focus on expanding and improving the program while still participating in the more hands-on aspects because managerial responsibilities will be better shared.
Finally, we will continue to maintain a close relationship with the Gifted Advisory Council (GAC), an advisory board for the school board that advocates for the AIG program in New Hanover County, as well as the county AIG specialists.