When Berna Barshay did a volunteer teaching stint in an elementary school junior achievement class more than a decade ago in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood, she came away discouraged. Most pupils were attentive and respectful, but every week the same few students would disrupt the class.
Today, Barshay recounts that experience when she talks about the “80/20 rule,” which holds that 20 percent of a classroom’s students typically take up 80 percent of a teacher’s time. “I couldn’t get even a quarter through a lesson plan,” she says. “It stuck with me because I found it so depressing. How are these kids going to not end up dropping out and working hourly jobs? If you can’t provide an education, it’s just a vicious loop.”
Barshay, 38, until recently a director with reinsurance company Swiss Re’s internal long-short equity investment group, has since become deeply involved with Harlem-based Friends of the Children New York, the local chapter of a national mentoring program for at-risk students. Brought into the group in 1997 by a fellow Harvard Business School graduate, she joined the board in 2007.
The organization is built on long-term commitment: Pupils are in the program from kindergarten or first grade through high school. The “friends” are professional mentors who partner with children. “It’s all the basic life skills. How do you learn proper nutrition? How do you learn good study skills?” Barshay explains.
The program actively seeks out troubled children — the classroom terror or the recluse with social problems. All of the 91 children in the group live below the poverty line. The majority come from single-parent households, many have teenage mothers, and some have family members in jail or on drugs. Overwhelmed parents of students in the program are often anxious for help, says Barshay, who puts the cost per child during their enrollment in the program at about $12,000 per year — not much, she argues, compared with the societal and fiscal costs of teenage motherhood or prison.
The group sponsors 12 paid mentors who split the children among them. Mentors must have an undergraduate degree in education or human services and two years of experience working with at-risk children. They must make a three-year commitment and promise to spend at least four hours a week with each of their assigned children (mentors often devote much more time to the program, however, because building a trusting relationship with a family demands it).
Barshay is a believer in the halo effect that mentored children have on their peers: “When we help two or three kids in the room, we’re helping all 30, because it really changes the environment,” she notes.
Students enrolled with Friends of the Children usually outperform others on language and math skills. The program’s offices even have a kitchen where children are taught important nutritional skills that are often missing in their home life.
Barshay says the organization’s goals include expanding beyond the Bronx to the four other New York City boroughs, building the organization’s teen program, increasing its donor base and establishing an endowment. But her overarching concern is to create a support system for kids who wouldn’t otherwise have one: “It’s all about these kids who have a lot of transient aspects in their life having something that’s permanent and consistent.”
For more information, visit www.friendsofthechildrenny.org.
