Successful Peninsula "On the Mark" Tutor-Mentor Matches

Although the Parents Place On the Mark mentor-tutor program has been up and running on the Peninsula for only about a year, it has recruited some wonderful mentors who are already having a big impact on the lives of the young people they work with.

One of these mentors, Alfred Amkraut, is a German refugee who fled Europe in 1938 to escape the Holocaust and emigrated to Bolivia, where he spent many years before coming to the U.S. Alfred mentors Buddy Franco, a youngster who is reading far below grade level due to his significant learning disabilities, and whose mother Cecilia barely speaks English. Fortunately, due to his fluency in Spanish, in addition to mentoring Buddy, Alfred is able to translate for Cecilia and assist her in lobbying the school system for the special education services Buddy needs. Like many of the other On the Mark mentors, Alfred doesn't feel like he's doing anything particularly noteworthy by helping the Franco family. As he explains it, "The world is full of problems and it behooves us to try to find as many solutions as we can."

Another On the Mark mentor, Ben Karlin, a Stanford graduate student, has also made a huge difference in his mentee's life. Ben is matched with "Hank", a very intelligent-and also very angry-youngster with oppositional defiant disorder who was 11 when his father died and who acted out sufficiently to get himself expelled from school. Since being matched with Ben, "Hank" has settled down, started at a new school and begun making friends. His mother, Marina, credits this big change in "Hank" to Ben's influence.

When asked how he feels about mentoring, Ben observed, "Mentoring is great because it gives you the opportunity to make an important difference in someone's life and have fun at the same time. I very much enjoy the time that I spend with Hank and I think that most other mentors would probably echo this sentiment. I think that it's very easy for people to get overly focused on their careers, social lives, etc. to the extent that they don't believe that they have the time to be a mentor. I worried about this before I started meeting with Hank. But it was my experience, and I think that this is probably true for others as well, that after several weeks of being a mentor I had a new sense of perspective, and it was easy for me to see that I actually did have plenty of time to spend one hour a week on something as meaningful as this program."

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