APFSI

July 27, 2010: MENTOR and state Mentoring Partnerships, along with our national partners, are engaging in a national discussion about the documentary Waiting for Superman, which highlights challenges in the American public education system and is being released by the same team that brought the world An Inconvenient Truth, including Davis Guggenheim as creator and director, Participant Media as producer and Paramount Pictures as distributor.
In this film, Guggenheim explores some of the challenging issues surrounding the United States public education system and identifies a few of the innovators who are making changes that they believe can better prepare the next generation for opportunity and success.
MENTOR is working with a number of partners to conduct screenings of this movie in order to promote conversations and encourage action. MENTOR hopes the film and discussions will help people realize that mentoring is a powerful solution to keeping kids in school.
A pledge to see the film, as well as its preview trailer, can be found at http://www.WaitingForSuperman.com/?utm_source=Mentor&utm_medium=Partners.
"We realized that this film had the potential to spark a national conversation about our children's future," said MENTOR's President and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Larry Wright. "We felt this was an excellent opportunity to work with as many of our partners as possible to mobilize Americans to end the dropout crisis and prepare young people for college and a 21st century career."
A recent study from Big Brothers Big Sisters revealed that 89 percent of mentored youth reported that the mentoring program helped them improve their school attendance and performance, while 93 percent of mentored youth said that the program influenced them to finish high school and go to college.
In addition to participating in the conversation around Waiting for Superman, MENTOR also partnered with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and Mentoring USA in the recently-launched Academic Achievement through Mentoring initiative. This initiative aims to link potential mentors with young people in the 2,000 lowest-performing schools in the country, which account for approximately 50 percent of students who drop out of high school and 75 percent of students of color who drop out. Additionally, MENTOR is a partner with America's Promise Grad Nation campaign centered on dropout prevention, found at www.americaspromise.org.
For more information about the documentary, visit the pledge link. For more information about Academic Achievement through Mentoring, visit www.mentoring.org/aatm/. For more information about mentoring, go to www.mentoring.org.