They Banked On Mentors

Nazjahnay Boyd needed help writing about Romeo & Juliet. So she headed to KeyBank, where someone in loan servicing stood at the ready to help her. With an English paper. 

Boyd is a freshman at James Hillhouse High School, where her English classes have been getting her down. James Gauthier is in the loan servicing department at KeyBank. The two are working together to describe why Romeo & Juliet is less compelling than The Lion King II.

Their collaboration is a product of KeyBank’s new Workplace Mentoring Program, a partnership between KeyBank, New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), and the Governor’s Prevention Partnership (GPP), of which the bank has been a longtime supporter. Tuesday afternoon, KeyBank hosted an end-of-year reception for its first mentorship cohort, a group of 11 freshman from Hillhouse.

After KeyBank expressed interest in hosting the program last year, Market President Jeff Hubbard and Senior Communications Manager Karen Crane met with Gemma Joseph Lumpkin and Kermit Carolina, the chief and supervisor of youth, family and community engagement for NHPS. Hubbard and Crane met with Board of Education administrators, pitching their idea and listening to feedback. As the program began to take shape — KeyBank said it could host around 15 students for its first year — Lumpkin focused on a particular area of need: Students transitioning from middle to high school may become disengaged as they float from one school setting to another. 

If students can get through that first year of high school, Lumpkin told the KeyBank reps, they’re less likely to drop out, and tend to perform better in their classes. That’s why she zeroed in on 11 freshman — 10 girls and one boy — at Hillhouse. 

Since February, those students have been coming to KeyBank after school twice a month, on Tuesday afternoons. Each gets paired with a mentor based on the subjects with which they need help — mostly math, but also English, writing, and public speaking. KeyBank cubicles and wood-paneled offices transform into speechwriting hubs, math classrooms, and editing centers.

For the last several weeks, Crane said, the sessions have shifted focus to summer jobs, with several students applying to LEAP’s summer counselor program.

“It’s fun being around these students” Crane said. ​“We’re learning with them.” 

When Boyd first arrived at KeyBank, she wasn’t sure how Gauthier’s loan servicing skills were going to help her out — until she learned that he was also a published author. Gauthier gave her one of his books, and she gave him her latest problem: how to compare a Shakespearian script and Disney sequel in a paper that was due at the end of the year. As the two worked through narrative structure and plot points, Boyd realized that she could tie the works together across centuries.

Sitting beside her after Tuesday’s reception, friend and fellow mentee Janyel Campbell said that she’d experienced the same sort of transformation in her studies, as Hubbard taught her about cash flow and loan distribution as a better way to understand her math classes.

Kyera Toney, 15 years old, said she felt academic pressure after she was tasked with writing, memorizing, and delivering a mock TED talk in her English class. After identifying ​“the problem with perfection” as her theme, she worked with Crane to devise a structure, submitting drafts for edits when it was almost done. Crane helped her get it down to seven pages, a length that would take her about 15 minutes to deliver. Then Toney memorized it, ​“paragraph by paragraph, page by page,” over three days. It went off without a hitch, Toney said. She added that she sees Crane as ​“helping me move in the right direction.”

Both Crane and Lumpkin said that they are looking forward to the program’s growth and continuation this fall, when the 11 current students return as sophomores and another cohort of freshman joins anew. While the size of the incoming cohort depends on how many KeyBank staffers offer to become mentors, Crane said that she hopes to add sessions on financial literacy and managing a bank account.

“What we do know is that adults in a child’s life make a substantial difference in keeping young people on the right track,” said Lumpkin after the event. ​“I hope that this is truly a model for what can happen with more banks and more institutions around the city and the region.”