They Throw Lifelines to Drowning Students

She stumbled into high school four years ago bright but unmotivated, teetering between failure and success.

“My attitude was positive,” Cynthia Lemus recalls. “But my grades--mostly Cs and Ds--were not.”

When she graduates from El Camino High on Thursday--her report card dotted with As and Bs--she’ll have her mentor, Liz Sinderbrand, to thank.

“She helped me in every single thing I was failing,” says Cynthia, 18, who will begin taking college courses this summer and plans to study fashion design in the fall. “She taught me what it means to be a responsible person.”

Cynthia is one of more than 400 students who have passed through El Camino’s 5-year-old Academic Mentor program, aimed at keeping failing students in school, out of gangs, away from drugs.

“We target students who come out of middle school with a D in English or math--students who’ve already fallen so far behind, they’re at high risk for failure,” says Gloria Morrison, a former math teacher who runs the program on the Woodland Hills campus, better known for its brainy Academic Decathlon team than for its underclass of struggling kids.

For years, mentoring has been the watchword of programs designed to help at-risk youth. The concept is simple: Provide a role model to meet with youngsters regularly, to guide, inspire and encourage them.

At El Camino High, each student is paired with a volunteer . . . doctors, accountants, supermarket checkers, parents whose own kids have graduated, teachers who give up their free periods to participate.

“Once a week, the mentors sit and have lunch and talk with the kids,” Morrison says. They focus on academic performance, but many grow close enough to their students to reach into their personal lives.

“One mentor realized his student needed glasses and talked it over with the nurse, who found a clinic in Los Angeles to provide them. Another--an ophthalmologist at Kaiser--took her student to work for a day at the medical center. And it was the first time I ever saw that child fired up about education, feeling that it could make a difference in her life.”

It is not always easy or fulfilling . . . for the mentor or the mentored. Some kids chafe at the close supervision, some adults feel disillusioned when their good advice seems to fall on deaf ears.

“But with most of these kids, we see the difference,” Morrison says. Their grades rise, their attendance improves, “because once a week they know somebody’s coming, someone will be checking up on them, someone will be asking . . . how they did on that English test, how many times they were tardy this week.

“It makes them think about what they are doing, makes them want to do something good, so they’ll have something to tell their mentor that is positive.”

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But it’s not a one-way street, mentoring teens. As Bob Morris can tell you, the benefits tend to flow both ways.

Morris runs the mentor program for girls at Penny Lane, a San Fernando Valley agency that operates foster homes and residential treatment centers for children who have been neglected or abused.

Mentoring his girls “can be hard work,” he says. “Some of these girls have difficult problems. We knew they would benefit when we started this program. What we didn’t know was that the mentors would enjoy it so much too.

“I’ve been amazed at the patience they’ve shown, the love they’ve gotten back from these girls. We’ve had mentors who stick with their girls even after they’ve left our program, who call us back and talk so proudly about how the girls are doing.”

Morris has 23 mentors . . . and twice that many girls clamoring to be included. “It hurts to see them alone, week after week, on visiting days. We have so many girls who just don’t have anyone.”

At Penny Lane, mentoring is not just about escorting girls through high school and on to college and career. It’s about making them accountable to someone who cares, teaching life lessons by example, extending a lifeline to young women whose prior breaks have mostly been bad.

“Most of these girls have never really had anybody in their lives to guide them,” Morris says. Their parents are irresponsible or absent or weak. Some have been abused, or have been in foster care since they were very young. “You can see a kind of dullness in their eyes. They have no control over their destiny, they don’t know what’s going to happen next, they don’t seem to care.

“They’ve had therapists and counselors to help them, but they have never known anybody who’s shown interest in them and wasn’t being paid to do it.”

He recalls one girl in particular “who had very low self-esteem, no social skills, was always getting into it with the other girls, doing poorly in school. We matched her with this older woman, and it’s only been a month, but already her grades have picked up to As and Bs. And you can see the change in her, she’s so proud of what she’s done.

“And every time something good happens, she runs to her mentor to share the news.”

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Cynthia Lemus knows that feeling. “I learned the meaning of success from my mentor,” she says.

Some of it was the kind of practical advice that helped Cynthia chart her future. “One day she brought me all these phone numbers where I could call and find out about the different colleges. That’s how I figured out what I want to do.”

Some of it was the confidence Cynthia gained from hours of one-on-one conversation with a grown-up who listened to her. “I learned to communicate more easily with everyone. I learned that it mattered, what I had to say.”

And some of it was the power of a simple declaration that too many of our young people never hear:

“When I first met her, she started off by saying that I could do anything I wanted to do. And I thought about it and I started setting goals, and achieving my goals. And it made me feel so proud, I realized maybe she was right; that if I worked at it, I really could.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.