Cornwall College Old Boys’ Association launches mentorship programme

WESTERN BUREAU:

The students enrolled at Cornwall College in Montego Bay, St James, are poised to have an extra layer of mentorship as they are to benefit from a school-based programme initiated by the institution’s old boys’ association and other key stakeholders.

The programme, announced by Barrington Harvey, president of the Cornwall College Old Boys’ Association’s (CCOBA) New York chapter, is designed to drive greater academic success, school and community engagement, and foster positive outcomes for children and adolescents.

“A lot of these boys are going to need mentors,” said Harvey, who was speaking at the launch of the much-anticipated mentorship programme at the school on Monday. The programme is being coordinated by the old boys in partnership with the school’s administration.

Harvey said mentees will be facilitated for the seven years of their high school life, which was recently extended from five years to seven years through the Government’s mandatory sixth-form pathways programme.

“They’re going to need someone who they can trust. They will need somebody who they can refer to, especially when it comes to career choices, lifestyle and personal decisions in terms of how they live their life,” said Harvey.

According to Harvey, a special effort will be made to avoid pointing any of the students in any specific direction as it relates to church or religious belief.

“For the mentorship programme, we are staying far away from religion and those things. It’s not going to be a religious indoctrination, it is about developing the boys,” stated Harvey.

The CCOBA official also explained that the cadre of mentors will be assembled from among the old boys and other non-Cornwallians, including women, with critical skills.

Harvey said the decision on the boys who will be selected for mentoring will be done through the school’s guidance counselling department, and that the programme is not necessarily designed for boys who display poor behaviour.

“Yes, if you have boys like that (bad behaving), fine, but mentorship is to make a boy a more rounded human being. It’s not going to be possible to mentor all the boys, that is a fact, but we are going to try to mentor as many boys as possible,” he said.

Given the magnitude of the programme, Harvey said mentors could be called on to provide guidance to more than one boy.

“I hope they can take on three, so we have to see what the numbers look like and usually when something is going well, you get a lot of attraction and people are already seeking out how they can become a mentor, so we are working on it,” Harvey said.