Mentoring program hopes to give Henry Lord students entrepreneurial spirit

Robert Kraft and the Patriot Foundation teamed up with local businesses, including BayCoast Bank, Bob Karam, Mike Lund of Borden Light Marina and Todd Blount of Blount Foods to bring in Coaching for Change of Taunton.

FALL RIVER — There is never a shortage of great ideas in a middle school. A few minutes with the students will teach you that, said Aimee Bronhard, principal of the Henry Lord Community School.

The hard part is teaching the students how much work goes into turning dreams into reality. That takes a village.

Luckily, Henry Lord has a village to help.

Robert Kraft and the Patriot Foundation teamed up with local businesses, including BayCoast Bank, Bob Karam, Mike Lund of Borden Light Marina and Todd Blount of Blount Foods to bring in Coaching for Change of Taunton.

That organization will help teachers train high school and college students to work with middle school students as mentors.

“A lot of our kids have entrepreneurial inclinations,” Bronhard said. “But the idea of owning their own business might be foreign to them.

“With this program, we will have them create their own business.”

Students will meet with tutors twice a week after school to come up with a business plan, a marketing strategy, logos and slogans and the accounting methods to make their business work.

“Our teachers went to a training for this over the summer. They want to make sure the program is relevant and it can keep the kids engaged,” Bronhard said.

That sounds perfect to Marquis Taylor, the person who created Coaching for Change. The organization uses the shorter name, C4C.

Taylor grew up in the poor part of Los Angeles, California. He saw his friends fall one by one, kids who were fair students until the distractions of being a teenager took them away.

They were the kids in the middle — not the best students, not the worst — who got the least attention in the classroom.

He was one of them. Luckily, he was a star basketball player.

“Education is hard,” he said. “I found it difficult to just sit still.

“What saved my life is sports. I was a kid in the middle. But, luckily, I was an athlete, so I got the extra resources.

“But how do we create opportunities for folks who aren’t the best academically and who don’t have the extra attention sports can give them.”

Basketball got Taylor into Stonehill College. That got him a job in real estate development, but four years of that left him dissatisfied. He got a master’s in education from Smith College and then began teaching in Springfield. He also began thinking about the ideas that would form C4C.

C4C started in Brockton and then expanded to Taunton, where 256 students have taken part in the program.

In Fall River, C4C will start with 32 students in October and expand to 64 for the second half of the school year, Taylor said.

The tutors will be students from B.M.C Durfee High School, working with education majors from Stonehill, Bristol Community College, UMass Dartmouth and Bridgewater State College.

“The college students lead the day-to-day classes and the high school students act as teacher aides,” Taylor said. “The Henry Lord teacher will oversee and mentor.

“It is a tiered system that helps everyone learn.”

And it works, he promised. In Taunton, 88 percent of the students in the program improved their grades. They also had a big drop in disciplinary incidents, Taylor said.

“We are really excited about working with the staff at Henry Lord,” he said.

And he is confident that, working together, they can impart the bedrock philosophy of C4C.

“Life is hard,” he said. “But if you think creatively, it can be easier.”

Email Kevin P. O’Connor at koconnor@heraldnews.com.