Launching MSM: Year 2 Feasibility Findings

The goal of the Military Student Mentoring (MSM) Project is to develop a strategic model for school-based mentoring (SBM) for military students in the elementary school grades. MSM is implemented by elementary schools in partnership with local mentoring agencies. In Year 1, we began the process of developing the MSM program. Our beginning premise was that an effective strategy for serving military students will require dedicated staff and concentrated effort by school districts to establish home-school-community (HSC) partnerships involving four key stakeholders: a) local elementary schools, b) military parents of students at those schools, c) local community organizations, and d) local mentoring agencies (Epstein et al., 2009). Without support from and collaboration among community organizations, mentoring agencies and, most importantly, military families, schools would find it difficult to identify, engage, and serve military students (Astor et al., 2013; Esqueda et al., 2012).

In this poster, we describe the launch of the MSM program and provide preliminary findings on its feasibility and usability. The site for the MSM project is the North Thurston Public School system, located near Olympia, WA and south of Joint Base Lewis-McChord. After launching the MSM program this fall, we began to gather feedback on the fidelity of its implementation, on the feasibility of its various components, and on the usability of the MSM manual. Implementation data focused on the extent to which the school district’s MSM Coordinator was able to establish HSC Support Teams at each participating school, the number of military families contacted about the program, and the number of military students referred into the MSM school-based mentoring program.  We also tracked the degree to which staff at the local mentoring agency  (BBBS of SW Washington) successfully recruited volunteer mentors, whether those mentors were matched with military students, and the consistency of school-based mentoring visits. Feasibility of the MSM program was assessed via reports from those implementing the MSM program as well as from participating students, parents, teachers, and mentors. Usability of the MSM manual was assessed via feedback from those implementing the program as well as from project consultants, members of our local Development Team, and members of our national Advisory Board.