HELPING LEADERS GROW
Hamilton County starts mentorship program for select freshmen students
As Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp spoke to 10 Brainerd High School freshmen Friday morning, he told them the community needs more young men to be leaders.
“Y’all have been selected — not just to go through a process where we want to help lift y’all up as leaders — you’re already recognized as leaders,” Wamp said. “We want you to come alongside us and help us envision the future of Brainerd High School, but also the future of our communities.”
The students are part of a new initiative from the county mayor’s office dubbed the 40 Program, which will provide 40 male students with mentoring and support throughout high school. The program launched with its first 20 students at Brainerd High and Tyner Academy on Friday.
At both schools, students will meet each Friday during their elective period to learn about different topics, including how to present themselves as a man, government and politics, and maturity and growth.
“It’s about us planting seeds and watching you all grow,” LaDarius Price, the county government’s deputy director for community development, told students at Tyner. “It’s really cultivating you and helping you to grow and giving you different resources that you’re going to need to be extremely successful.”
Those resources include guest speakers, field trips and introductions to people working in the fields students have career interests in. The students will also complete community service projects, which Price said he hopes will teach them how to provide resources and opportunities to other people.
“The opportunity is y’alls for the taking,” Wamp said at Brainerd High. “All of the resources of the county mayor’s office, County Commission, the county government is at y’alls disposal. What we’re invested in is you guys having the opportunity to understand your community in a different way than you normally would be able to as ninth graders.”
The program was initiated earlier this year when County Commissioner Greg Beck, D-North Brainerd, approached Wamp with the vision of creating a mentorship program for young men.
“Ninth grade is really that time where you can go left, meaning to the negative, or you can be set on the right pathway. With us starting out in the ninth grade at the very beginning of the year, it sets a precedent for where we want these young men to be, and it gives them an opportunity to tap into the different opportunities that we’re presenting them.”
— LADARIUS PRICE, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, HAMILTON COUNTY
It will expand to include freshman cohorts at The Howard School and Central High next school year.
“We’re here to try to prepare you for the big one that is going to come your way,” Beck told Brainerd students. “You were placed here to do something big, to be a change agent.”
Both Wamp and Price, who oversees the program, emphasized they wanted to teach and open doors for students, as well as give students an opportunity to lead alongside them.
One way students at Brainerd High could lead in the near future, Wamp said, was by giving feedback on the implementation of the school facilities plan released last month. The proposal recommends renovating and expanding Brainerd to create a co-located middle-high school with students from Dalewood Middle.
The 10 students at each school were recommended to the program by their high school or middle school principals. Price said he wanted to work with students who had been identified as having the potential to elevate their life with the resources the program provides.
“Ninth grade is really that time where you can go left, meaning to the negative, or you can be set on the right pathway,” Price said in an interview. “With us starting out in the ninth grade at the very beginning of the year, it sets a precedent for where we want these young men to be, and it gives them an opportunity to tap into the different opportunities that we’re presenting them.”
At Tyner, students walked to the front of the room to introduce themselves and say where they see themselves after graduation. Their future plans ranged from starting their own business to working in real estate to becoming a zoologist.
Wamp cited the Tyner students who walked out in August 2021 to protest the school’s poor conditions and prompted the construction of a new building as an example of the significance of young leadership.
“Our community has got a great legacy of letting young people lead,” Wamp said. “Sooner than you realize you can make a big difference.”