During the 2007-2008 school year, under the leadership of Amalia Pares-Pomerantz, concerned educators at Plantation High School formed a professional learning community to address the academic needs of African-American male students. This group became AAMSA – African American Male Student Achievement group; members included Shirley Baker, Diana Carter, Arlene Galarza, Wayne Johnson, Paul Kantorski, Patricia Lesesne, Dona McKenzie, Jeanne Pellegrino, Frank Pinkney and Teresa Young.

During the following school year, after much exploration of effective intervention strategies by the group, Shirley Baker suggested a mentoring model through which low-achieving African-American male freshmen would be paired with high-achieving upperclassmen in a mentor-mentee relationship as a means to promote and increase academic achievement. This model was enthusiastically embraced and implemented by the group and through the diligence, tenacity, and creativity of Baker, Mentoring Tomorrow’s Leaders (MTL), was created.

In the first year of the program, over 40 high achieving, African-American male Plantation High students volunteered to become MTL mentors and began to work with their mentees. The following year, educator Patricia Lesesne further developed the program with clearly established guidelines and prescriptive programmatic cycles, and successfully launched MTL at Boyd H. Anderson High School. The principal and administrative staff at Boyd H. Anderson fully supported the implementation of the model.

To date, MTL mentees at Boyd H. Anderson have reported improvements in GPA from below 1.8 up to 3.0 (or higher) within one quarter of a school year. The mentors and parents at Boyd H. Anderson have reported an increase in confidence and leadership skills among the mentors, and 100 percent of the first group of black, male mentors at Boyd H. Anderson are now enrolled in four-year colleges or universities.

While AAMSA/MTL was working to improve the academic success of African American male students at Boyd H. Anderson and Plantation high schools, the BCPS High School Graduation Rate Task Force, headed by Dr. Laurel E. Thompson, director of Student Services, was working diligently to identify strategies to improve the high school graduation rate within the district. MTL was recognized as one viable model for increasing the graduation rate, and was written into a proposal for a five-year grant for $4.5 million from the USDOE High School Graduation Initiative (HSGI).

On September 30, 2010, BCPS was notified that the Mentoring Tomorrow’s Leaders project was one of twenty-four projects in the nation to be awarded the HSGI grant. The grant allowed for the MTL model to be fully implemented at Boyd H. Anderson and Plantation high schools – schools that met the USDOE’s guidelines for dropout rates.