A team of three Duke students competed this week in the final round of a social entrepreneurial challenge that aimed at increasing statewide high school graduation rates.
The IGNITE Peer Mentoring program received $1,000 as a finalist team in this year’s Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh Tuesday. Their project was a sustainable program focused on personal interaction between high school students to decrease ninth grade drop out rates.
“A million students who enter ninth grade every year don’t graduate with their peers,” said sophomore Andrew Hanna, a member of the IGNITE team.
Hanna, sophomore Nicole Whang and sophomore Lauren Gonzalez started working on IGNITE in a Fall 2011 class—“Social Entrepreneurship in Action”—taught by Tony Brown, professor of practice of public policy and sociology.
The peer-mentoring program will be implemented in public high schools in the Triangle. The framework pairs three ninth graders with one upperclassman in local high schools and structures a program where they regularly meet for one school year. Aside from receiving continuous support from the upperclassman, the ninth graders will work with their mentor to create a freshman documentary film using technology and social media. The team wants to fully implement their program by the fall, in time for this year’s incoming high school freshmen. Volunteer Duke students will help train the high school mentors.
“We want Duke students helping [high school] upperclassmen and empowering them with leadership skills, so it will be sustainable and less dependent on Duke students volunteering and more dependent on the upperclassmen,” Hanna said.
Hanna added that he hopes the program will create a strong bond between upperclassmen and freshmen throughout the year, so freshmen can be provided with the support to succeed academically.
Ninth grade is a crucial year for a student’s high school career because they have to deal with many issues including the transition from middle school to a new environment, Hanna said. The upperclassmen—who have made the transition before—would help freshmen deal with social and behavioral aspects of social engagement, so they would be able to focus on academics.
“The only way students would engage academically is if they’re comfortable, and feel like they have a home at school,” he said.
Ann Brewster, a research scholar in the Program in Education, has acted as a mentor for the project. Brewster discussed peer-mentoring principles with the student team and helped them develop their mentoring manual and curriculum. Brewster said she is optimistic about the progress of IGNITE and hopes that they will achieve more than just increasing high school graduation rates.
“I see this project as a good representative of the greater mission at Duke—to become more involved in the community,” Brewster said. “It is a true collaboration between Duke students and high school students from day one.”
In its second year of hosting the competition, the Emerging Issues Prize for Innovation received applications from 70 local teams, from which five finalists were chosen in both high school and college categories.
Lane Smith, outreach manager for Institute for Emerging Issues, said this year’s challenge was to come up with projects to increase North Carolina’s high school graduation rate, which is currently at 78 percent.
“The Duke team had a great idea, their video was fantastic,” Smith said, adding that the forum drew around 1,000 state leaders.
The winner of the challenge—a team from University of North Carolina at Greensboro—received $5,000 to implement their idea called LinkedUp, a long term mentoring program where high achieving ninth grade students will be paired up with at-risk fifth graders for eight years.
They plan on using all $5,000 on funding training and curriculum resources as well as college application fees and SAT classes for the mentors involved in the program, said Alex Thibeault, a LinkedUp team member and student in UNC-Greensboros’s doctoral program in clinical psychology.
“This is something [outside our academic work] that we are all interested in and passionate about, and we all have this strong desire to inspire change,” said Anjali Gowda, one of Thibeault’s teammates and a fellow doctoral candidate in UNC-Greensboro’s clinical psychology program.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate student Julian Wooten was another finalist in the challenge. Wooten, a student at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, said the Emerging Issues Forum provided helpful resources for his project: Students and Teachers Employing New Criteria in Learning. This project is a software program that warns teachers of students at a higher risk of dropping out.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Lauren Gonzalez as a graduate student. Gonzalez is a sophomore. The Chronicle regrets the error.
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