Academy 4 Mentoring with Pillow Elementary

Mentoring a 4th grader with Academy 4 is a great way to get to know other Westover people and make a huge difference in our community. Westover is paired with 4th graders at Pillow Elementary, which is less than 2 miles from Westover. Mentoring with Academy 4 occurs 1 Friday each month for 90 minutes. If you’ve got questions, please contact our Westover coordinator, Bryona Maxwell Bryona.Maxwell@academy4.org Westover’s mentoring dates for 2025-2026 are (all Fridays): September 18th, October 23rd, November 13th, December 4th, January 22nd, February 19th, March 5th, April 9th, and May 14th. Spark Clubs are 11:45-1:15pm and mentoring is from 1:00-2:30pm. Pillow Elementary’s address is 3025 Crosscreek Dr., Austin, TX 78757 Sound like fun? Get started by signing up to mentor through the Academy 4 website here » Please note: mentoring requires a background check and training, so please sign up in advance What is Academy 4? Academy 4 equips communities and churches to build lasting relationships with schools and families through mentoring 4th graders. Academy 4 volunteers come together for 90 minutes, one Friday a month to mentor fourth graders in economically disadvantaged schools in and around DFW, Austin, and Memphis, TN. Community You may be asking how we make this happen- how do we provide a mentor for EVERY single 4th grader? It begins with our partnerships with local churches and the community. Every school we serve is partnered with a local church, and then we invite other organizations, business, and community members to come alongside the church to volunteer together. And that is perhaps the most powerful thing about Academy 4: we all serve together, and collectively we all get to be a part of a community for 4th graders and the entire school! We truly make them feel SPECIAL! They know that there are people in their community that care about them, their teachers, and the whole school! Why Academy 4? At the heart of why we do Academy 4 is this simple but profound notion: kids need positive relationships. As this study from 2012 asserts, “positive relationships are the most important thing in a child’s development.” (Source: Pianta, R.C., Hamre, B.K., Allen, J.P. (2012). Teacher-student relationships and engagement: Conceptualizing, measuring, and improving the capacity of classroom interactions. In S.L. Christenson et al+, (Eds), Handbook of research on student engagement, p. 369) Why 4th Grade? Fourth graders are becoming more individualistic, and their values and morals are forming. 4th graders are on the cusp of adolescence, have the language skills and cognitive ability to gather information, formulate opinions and thoughts that are well-organized and thought-out. They are at a stage between childhood and adolescence where they are more open to and listen to adults. A study (Schmidt, McVaugh, & Jacobi) showed impact of mentoring is greater for 4th over 5th graders. They compared a group of 4th graders with mentors, a group of 4th graders without, and a group of 5th graders with mentors. Not only did the 4th graders with mentors have better results than their peers without a mentor, they also performed better than the 5th graders with mentors. And that’s because