Click here to view the list of schools participating in Mentoring Tomorrow's Leaders.

MTL has grown and evolved substantially over the years, serving the educational and social emotional needs of approximately 2,500 - 3,000 students from different backgrounds. MTL currently serves students in 1 elementary, 16 middle and 31 high schools with an emphasis on increased program growth potential among high school student populations. MTL boasts a consistent annual graduation rate of 95% or higher among active participants and students consistently demonstrate improvements in academic achievement, attendance, effective communication, leadership skills and social emotional development.  MTL students are also less likely to engage in behaviors resulting in disciplinary actions, drop out of school, use illicit drugs or participate in gang activity. As a result, MTL has extensive positive name recognition within BCPS and throughout the community.

Alumni of the MTL program are represented in colleges and universities around the country and continue their service to MTL through Alumni forums and other opportunities to engage, motivate and demonstrate pathways to postsecondary opportunities for the students currently enrolled in the program.

MTL is supported by the Mentoring Across Broward Team, which is a part of the district’s Equity, Diversity and School Climate Department.

During the 2007-2008 school year, under the leadership of Amalia Pares-Pomerantz, concerned high school 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 exploration of effective intervention strategies by the group, a peer-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 was suggested. This model was enthusiastically embraced and implemented by the group and Mentoring Tomorrow’s Leaders (MTL), was the name ultimately given to the new program.

In the first year of the program, over forty high achieving, African American male Plantation High School students volunteered to become MTL mentors and began to work with their mentees. The MTL program was further refined to include clearly established guidelines and prescriptive programmatic cycles prior to being launched the following year at Boyd H. Anderson High School.

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 to be utilized for increasing the graduation rate. This model was written into a proposal for a 5-year grant for $4.5 million from the USDOE High School Graduation Initiative (HSGI) and 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.  This grant allowed for the MTL model to be fully implemented at Boyd H. Anderson High School and Plantation High School – schools that met the USDOE’s guidelines for dropout rates.

Information will be forthcoming.

Plantation Middle School