TRAVERSE CITY -- Paige Phillips, 9, a third-grader at Central Grade School knows she's lucky. She just doesn't know how lucky she is.
Paige meets every Monday with a mentor, a retired teacher with 32 years of experience. Paige gets help with letter combinations, vocabulary, math -- or sometimes she just chats. And Paige readily admits she has no idea why her mentor, Betty Lape, shows up every week or who recruited and trained her.
It was Lape's church.
Volunteers from area churches routinely help out in local public schools. And everyone's thrilled with the arrangement.
"There's a need for additional support for students," said Sharon Dionne, principal at Central Grade School for 12 years who moved to Blair Elementary this year. "I didn't have the money to purchase help. It was hard for me to find a large body of consistent volunteers.
"I am so happy we found a church," Dionne said.
Blair is the newest school to be partnered with a church, teaming up with Living Hope Church within the last two weeks.
Kids Hope USA, a 15-year-old national organization, organizes, vets and trains the volunteers -- one church is paired with one school. The main rule: No evangelizing.
"You can't use God talk," said Virgil Gulker, Kids Hope USA founder.
"We always help the mentors understand they must not talk about church," Gulker said. "At first, it was a dominant issue, but it's an issue that's changed over time."
Most kids don't even ask why their mentor is there, but if they do, the subject of church is skirted until the topic is changed entirely, Gulker said.
He was in town recently for a regional meeting at Bay Pointe Church on Secor Road, one of the four churches providing mentors. New volunteers went through training while seasoned mentors attended sessions on prayer partners, games to play with students and the social and emotional needs of the children.
Kids Hope pairs every mentor with a prayer partner, someone to confide in, keep up to date with and bounce suggestions off. Lape is one of the few mentors who also serves as someone else's prayer partner. She sees her partner at least every couple weeks, and "we always know where we are in the relationship," she said.
The prayer partners are one of the things that separate Kids Hope from other mentoring programs, Gulker said. He also cites the commitment the volunteers have.
"A mentor who is not faithful can actually damage a child," he said.
In her six years as a Kids Hope volunteer, Lape has mentored two children, one for five years and Paige, going on three years.
Lape is also the Kids Hope director for Faith Reformed Church, responsible for recruiting, screening and ongoing support. The church currently has 39 volunteers working with children.
Gulker said the relationship between the churches and Kids Hope is also a big reason the program thrives. Churches pay an affiliate fee and 68 percent of Kids Hope donors are volunteers with the program. Kids Hope has a $1.5 million budget nationally.
"If we abandoned churches, our budget would be $9 million," Gulker said. "We use the existing infrastructure that churches have."
Kids Hope doesn't use any federal funding, although it would be allowed.
"I don't like (to call Kids Hope) 'faith based,'" Gulker said. "I like 'faith motivated.'"
Kids Hope
Locally, four churches are involved with four schools:
-- Glen Lake Reformed Church/Maple City Glen Lake Public Schools
-- Bay Pointe Community Church/Traverse Heights Elementary
-- Faith Reformed Church/Central Grade School
-- Living Hope Assembly/Blair Elementary (in the works)
Volunteers commit to one hour a week.
Kids Hope is active in 29 states, has 531 programs and works with 8,000 children.
In MIchigan, there are 211 programs with 4,300 mentors.
Kids Hope organizers say 10 more church/school partnerships are needed in Traverse City. For more information, call one of the churches.
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