Being a freshman entering the high school is never easy. However, for the last six years, Hastings High has been trying to make it an easier transition through the Freshmen Mentoring Program.
"FMP has really helped me to learn rules at school and the easiest way to do things. At the beginning of the year it was really helpful when I was trying to find classrooms and stuff," freshman Cody Hoffa said.
Freshmen Mentoring Program, commonly referred to as FMP, is a class required for all freshmen that takes place opposite of their lunch period. It is equivalent to homeroom in Middle School, with one twist: the mentors. Each classroom is assigned five or six junior or senior students as mentors. These students get to know the students in the class and help them to learn lessons to guide them through high school.
FMP began six years ago, founded by resource teacher Peter Theoharis and assistant principal Tracy Douglas. It has since been lead by Douglas and P.E. teacher Kendra Laux. Though FMP is now school-wide, it did not begin that way.
"The first year was sort of a guinea pig group," Theoharis said. "Mrs. Douglas and I had looked at mentoring programs at other schools, so we tried something similar with a group of freshmen from study hall."
Theoharis and Douglas picked four seniors to mentor the 25 freshmen they took out of study hall. The program was centered around guiding the freshmen through the basics of high school.
"It began as an experiment, just to see how the program would work with the kids," Theoharis said. "Now it has morphed into something that works specifically for Hastings High."
Over the past few years, students have still been noticing slight changes in the program.
"They added the book and lessons to make it seem more useful," senior mentor Matt Fry. "My freshman year we just had activites and the mentors hung out with us. It was all about feeling more comfortable being in high school."
The 7 Habits for Highly Effective Teens, by Sean Covey, was added to FMP in 2008, when present-day juniors were freshmen. Its main purpose is to give more focus to the team building activities that are done with the freshmen. However, it may be having opposite effects in the classrooms.
"It's difficult to motivate the students to read," Fry said. "The class isn't a grade so a lot of them just don't care. They want to play the games, not read the book."
A majority of freshmen will back up that statement. When asked what they would change, an entire classroom of freshmen agreed that they would rather not read the book and instead get the lessons across in other ways. Some suggestions were using the white board to draw things out, or using real examples from the mentors' experiences.
"It really depends on the day," freshman Brooke Bailey said. "Sometimes it's exciting and other times it's really boring. Most of the time the book is the boring part, I feel like we're not really getting anything out of it."
Though freshmen feel as if their opinion means nothing when it comes to FMP, Laux and Douglas feel differently.
"We're always thinking of ways to better the program," Laux said. "Our biggest focus right now is making it more fun for the kids while still involving the lessons."
Since it began, FMP has slowly been evolving into a program that "fits" Hastings High.