Ric Keller: “this is a very creative outside-the-box way to provide an incentive to recruit mentors for at-risk kids, and I commend…”

“this is a very creative outside-the-box way to provide an incentive to recruit mentors for at-risk kids, and I commend the author of this amendment, Congressman Crowley, for coming up with this idea; and I will be voting for it. I had a mentor myself when I was a young child in Big Brothers Big Sisters program. When I got a little older and became an adult, I became a mentor to high school students through the largest mentoring program in Orlando, Florida, called Compact, which provides mentors to children who are at risk of dropping out of school. I then became chairman of the board of that organization; chairman of the Mentoring Caucus, once I got to Congress; and a coauthor of the Mentoring for Success Act with Congressman Tom Osborne, which is now part of No Child Left Behind. I tell you this by way of background, because I know that the hardest thing in mentoring organizations is recruiting mentors. I gave in 1 year 50 speeches to Rotary clubs and Kiwanis clubs to recruit 700 mentors, and it was very difficult because sometimes you only get folks to mentor for 1 year. But I saw that once you invested the time towards recruitment, it made a difference. That program, Compact, has a 95 percent success rate in keeping kids in school. As Congressman Crowley alluded to, that helps all of us in terms of lower incarceration rates. Right now, 75 percent of the inmates in our jails and prisons nationwide are high school dropouts.”