GREENSBORO — Wanted: Men with warm smiles, encouraging words and open eyes.
Eastern Guilford High School is reaching out to fathers and other men for a new volunteer initiative.
It’s called Positive Ongoing Paternal Support, or P.O.P.S.
School leaders hope to station the men in the halls, lunchrooms and parking lots, to offer greeting and encouragement to students, and to alert staff to anything amiss.
Tuesday’s first interest meeting for the group drew a small but enthusiastic bunch: about a half-dozen men, some parents of Eastern High students, others interested community members. Attendees pledged to help spread the word and recruit others to join.
“I remember the men in my life, in high school,” said parent Josh Green. “I grew up with a single mom. What those men meant to me just makes me want to give back.”
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The initiative aims to address a couple different issues, Principal Darrell Harris said.
One is that men are underrepresented among high school volunteers, so the school hopes to offer a special welcome to them to get involved.
“You might see dads at games and sporting events, but not much in the building,” he said.
The other, he said, is that staff are vastly outnumbered by students in the school, and they can use the help to keep a positive, supervised climate in the transitions at the beginning and end of the day and at lunch.
“We are in different times,” he said. “We’ve got to support our kids holistically.
We can’t just worry about instruction and academics, we have to make sure they are mentally and emotionally supported; we have to make sure our school is safe.”
While the recruitment effort is focused on men, anyone who feels called to the work and able to be a positive presence in the school is welcome to help out. A standard volunteer background check is required.
Harris explained to the men that while the school came up with name POPS, and tailored it to their own needs, the basic idea has been used in many other schools around the country, with one of the more well known being WATCH D.O.G.S. (Dads of Great Students) a national program established in 1998.
In Greensboro and High Point, the NAACP has an ongoing effort called Dads Organizing For Public Education (D.O.P.E.) that has combined volunteering in high schools with advocacy and get-out-the-vote efforts.
Harris said he wanted to lay out his expectations for them upfront, because he’s seen that parent interactions in schools are not always positive.
Volunteers, he said, should not be disciplining students or jumping in to break up fights. What they should do, he said, is alert staff to misbehavior like drug use or skipping class, and to any violence or safety issues. A gentle, “Should you be doing that?” could be appropriate, but not lectures or investigations.
Parents, he said, should keep their “volunteer hat” on while they volunteer, and not use their access to the school for inappropriate purposes, like, for example, pestering a student who had wronged their child.
When asked what they wanted to accomplish, the men in the group talked about building connections with students.
Jesse Walker, a retired firefighter whose children attended the school in the ‘80s and ‘90s, said that if there’s a good relationship, just seeing an adult can change a student’s mind about misbehavior.
“’Hey, that’s Mr. Walker there; I can’t do that,’” he imagined a student might think. “’I can’t go out that door. I can’t go in there and smoke. I can’t skip a class.’”
Creating those relationships, he said, is going to take hard work and humility.
“We need to eat that humble pie every time we are over here,” he said. “That will make a difference.”