Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Lunch, with a side order of mentoring
Adults serve as ‘lunch buddies’ to kids who need a role model
BENTONVILLE — Amber Keaton looks forward to Monday when Shannon Crain takes a break from her job at a local bank to eat lunch with her at Barker Middle School.
Crain usually brings something from a fastfood restaurant for the two of them to share.
They eat.
They chat.
They play Hangman.
“It’s nice to know someone actually listens to me,” said Amber, a 12-yearold sixth-grader.
Crain is one of dozens of adults who give their time to the Bentonville School District as “lunch buddies,” spending one lunch period a week with a student needing another adult role model in his or her life.
Crain has been Amber’s lunch buddy since the beginning of the school year. She’s mentored other kids through the same program for four years.
“I like getting out of my normal routine and coming in and helping any way I can,” Crain said. “I look forward to it as much as (Amber) does.”
Numerous schools in the district have had some version of a lunch buddy program for years. The district’s Bright Futures program made a concerted effort last year to recruit volunteers, particularly from Wal-Mart, to be lunch buddies.
Bright Futures is a program coordinating the efforts of schools, businesses and community members to meet the needs of children.
Being a lunch buddy is an easy way to make a huge impact on a child’s life, said Amanda Musick, the district’s director of student services and Bright Futures coordinator. Musick can speak from experience. This is her second year as a lunch buddy. She dines each week with a fourth-grader at Mary Mae Jones Elementary School.
Barker Middle School has about 15 lunch buddy pairs now, said Marisa Snow, the school’s counselor. Snow said she’s observed a difference in the students although it’s difficult to measure exactly what kind of impact the program has.
“I see it in the kids, as far as coming to school and their grades,” she said. “They seem happier. And that’s what matters.”
GIFT OF TIME
Jeff Snow, Marisa’s husband and a physical education teacher at Barker, is a lunch buddy to Tanner Barbour, 10. The two like to play
basketball in the gym after lunch.
“He taught me how to shoot,” Tanner said.
“Tanner’s a good kid,” Jeff Snow said. “He always gets along good with other people. Sometimes we have to talk about, at home, getting along with his brother and helping his mom out a little more.”
Shane Newell, a Bentonville businessman, met Mikey Faries in 2014 when Mikey was a student at Apple Glen Elementary School. The pair have been lunch buddies since then. Mikey, 11, is now a fifth-grader at Barker.
Newell learned last year Mikey didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, so Newell spent 15 of his visits with Mikey in Apple Glen’s bus loop teaching him how to ride.
“We’d time how fast he went around the bus loop, and he tried to beat his record every time,” Newell said.
“I actually noticed people were rooting for me,” Mikey said.
The pair commonly spend their time together in the gymnasium at Barker Middle School.
“Most of the time we talk about my grades to see if I’m good. Or if I need any help on something,” Mikey said.
Newell intends to continue being a part of Mikey’s life, saying he wants to be in the audience when Mikey accepts his high school diploma.
“I’d like to see that through until he graduates high school and just be there for him as an advocate and push him to make sure he’s doing good in school, doing good as a person, being respectful to his teachers, being an all-around good person,” Newell said.
The two have met outside of school once. Mikey said he’d like to do that more often.
Newell has two sons of his own — ages 10 and 12 — so he’s well aware of the issues that come with Mikey’s age group. Newell has another lunch buddy, a second-grader at Apple Glen.
“It’s just a great little program,” Newell said. “I try to encourage people to join if they have the time and the ability, because I think that’s probably the most precious gift you can give anybody, is the gift of your time. I probably get more out of it than sometimes I feel Mikey does.”
UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIP
Bentonville isn’t the only local school district with lunch buddies.
The University of Arkansas matches some of its students with second- through fifth-graders in 11 Springdale schools who are deemed in need of a mentor.
The program is a project of the Center for Research on Aggression and Victimization and has existed for at least a decade, said Freddie Pastrana Rivera, a graduate student who has been involved with the program as both a mentor and a coordinator.
University students, most of them undergraduates, sign up to be lunch buddies and receive credit as part of a service-learning course. The center interviews and fully vets potential mentors before they’re allowed to participate, Pastrana Rivera said. They also receive training.
Between 25 and 30 university students are involved in the program each semester. Many elect to stay with the program beyond the one-semester commitment, he said.
The elementary students chosen for the program typically are those who struggle when it comes to socializing with their classmates, said Sierra Engelmann, a counselor at Springdale’s Monitor Elementary School. She added it’s something the students really enjoy.
“It’s this cool college kid giving them some extra attention,” she said. “The kids really start to depend on that interaction and attention. Rarely do we have a student absent on a day they know their UA buddy is coming.”
Engelmann noted one student in particular who had a very tough time at the start of this school year — meltdowns, crying a lot and struggling with issues from the past.
After being paired with a college student mentor, “His attendance improved, his overall demeanor changed,” Engelmann said. “He’s more successful now.”
The lunch buddy program also is a chance to address bullying. Bullying might be seen as a “social phenomenon” that involves more than just an interaction between two students, Pastrana Rivera said.
“If a youth is being mean to another child, and the peers kind of reinforce that by laughing or guffawing or high-fiving, then we see that individual or group of individuals kind of get in a cycle where they’re rewarded for these negative behaviors,” Pastrana Rivera said.
But if a child ridicules another child’s clothing, for example, the mentor can interject with a positive comment about that child’s clothing, thus countering the bullying and modeling how children should talk to each other, he said.