Honoring Mentors and Supporting Efforts to Recruit Mentors

HONORING MENTORS AND SUPPORTING EFFORTS TO RECRUIT MENTORS -- (House of Representatives - January 21, 2004)

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Mr. KELLER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support the National Mentoring Month Resolution introduced by Congressman Tom Osborne. This resolution recognizes and supports the efforts of mentoring programs across our Nation. It embraces the notion that volunteer mentors can change the life of a troubled teen. This resolution celebrates the month of January as a month-long campaign focused on raising awareness of mentoring programs, their impact on our youth, and information on how to volunteer to become a mentor.

I am proud to be an original cosponsor to Congressman Osborne's resolution. Both Coach OSBORNE and I worked as mentors before coming to Congress and both felt a need to raise awareness of the cause once we were elected. Last Congress, we successfully passed the Mentoring for Success program, which provided money to start up new mentoring programs across the country. We also fought for increased Federal funding for local mentoring programs bringing that total to $100 million this year. In addition, we founded the Congressional Mentoring Caucus, a bipartisan organization designed to disseminate information about the positive impact mentoring programs have on our Nation's children.

Mentoring programs offer many benefits to children, particularly as it relates to educating our children. These programs are proven to help prevent children from dropping out of high school. In the state of Florida, we had a big problem. Only 53 percent of our children were graduating from high school. So, in Central Florida, we decided to do something about it by creating the Orlando/Orange County Compact Program. The Compact Program is a mentoring program that matches up students at risk of dropping out of high school with mentors from the business community. The mentors meet with the students 1 hour a week to work on homework and projects.

The results from this mentoring program have been dramatic. Over a period of 10 years, 98 percent of the children in the Compact Program have graduated from high school-the No. 1 graduation rate in the United States.

I would also like to discuss the crime prevention benefits of mentoring programs. In Florida, 70 percent of the inmates in our jails and prisons are high school dropouts. It costs taxpayers $25,000 a year for each Federal prisoner, compared with only $5,000 a year to educate a student in our public schools. Clearly, making the investment in mentoring programs now will save us literally hundreds of millions of dollars down the road in terms of reduced jail costs and reduced welfare costs.

In summary, mentoring programs make a meaningful difference in the lives of our young people; they improve education, prevent crimes, and will save us money. I urge all of my colleagues to support National Mentoring Month by participating in local programs in their home districts-together we can make a difference in the lives of our children.