School-based mentoring is modeled in Los Angeles County, CA. 

In school-based mentoring programs, adult volunteers or school staff serve as mentors and meet weekly with students at school for one-to-one relationship building and guidance.  Community-based organizations coordinate with school staff and provide mentors with training and oversight. 

Mentoring high school students in the school setting relies on adult volunteers or school personnel. It is a way to pair a caring adult with youth in need of mentorship and guidance to help them succeed. The school setting is often seen as an opportunity for reaching larger numbers of youth in a controlled setting that also allows access to educational, recreational, and developmental supports that may enhance the mentoring relationship.

The programs included in this analysis are the national Student Mentoring Program, Project CHANCE, SMILE, and other locally developed programs. See the Washington State Institute for Public Policy website for more on the literature available for these programs that was used to model the impact of mentoring. 

The programs included in this analysis are (in no particular order) the national Student Mentoring Program, Project CHANCE, SMILE, and other locally developed programs. See the Washington State Institute for Public Policy website for more on the literature available for these programs. 

To estimate the impact of a program or policy, we use systematic literature reviews to determine causal pathways and effect sizes. Well-researched interventions that have robust, high-quality evaluations allow us to model the impact of an intervention with greater certainty. However, sometimes interventions have limited evidence and not all of the outcomes that are likely to be associated with the intervention have been studied. In those cases, we can only model what is available in the evidence base. We urge future research to take the following gaps into consideration.

Graduation Rates by Race and Ethnicity – While the studies provided estimates of the effect of the intervention on high school graduation, there were no estimates for the effect on subgroups. Therefore, the model utilized the same effect size across all race and ethnicity subgroups. More research is needed to provide more precise measurements of the impact of the intervention.