Mentoring Matters Program Offers Academic and Life Opportunities for At-Risk Youth
Julie Portales poses with her adoptive grandsons Michael Portales, 11, and Anthony Portales, 15, at their home in San Jose. The boys are participants in the Turning Point Mentoring Program offered by the Alum Rock Counseling Center, which helps youth with help and guidance in school. – Maria J. Avila, San Jose Mercury News
One of Michael Portales’ favorite memories from the Turning Point mentoring program is the time he, his brother Anthony and his mentor, Angel, accidentally built the Exploding Box. Eleven-year-old Michael and 15-year-old Anthony live near San Jose City College with their adoptive family, including three younger siblings. They met mentors Angel Cabrera and Beatriz Valenzuela two years ago through the Alum Rock Counseling Center, and together they’ve gone to movies, attended art exhibits and brainstormed over school projects. Cabrera and Valenzuela chaperoned Anthony’s eighth-grade school dance, and often show up at his swim meets.
Turning Point, the program that introduced them, pairs trained adult mentors with kids who face challenges such as poverty, abusive family members, or gang involvement, or who are at risk of dropping out of school. In the case of Anthony and Michael, each came from abusive family situations before they were adopted years ago by Julie and Simone Portales, who are striving to give the boys happy childhoods despite financial and health-related struggles of their own.
Turning Point mentors spend at least two hours a week with their mentees, for at least one year. Often, the relationships last much longer. “Angel and Beatriz are like big brothers,” said Anthony. And the whole family still cracks up about what Michael calls the Exploding Box, the project that brought him top marks in his fourth-grade science class last year. “There’s a pump, like in air-conditioners or refrigerators, that removes air and replaces it with different air”, explained Michael. But he and Angel, with an assist from Anthony, were only taking air out of the wood-and-plastic box they built. The project was to focus on the idea of “space”, and Michael wanted to create a vacuum in the box. “If you put it on long enough, it will suck out all the air”, he said, moving his hands closer and closer together to show how the sides of the box reacted. When the wood cracked and the plastic pieces shot off and the sound rang out against the cement driveway where they were working, Anthony leaped over the other two, seeking shelter around the corner of the family’s apartment. Julie Portales, who the boys have always called grandma, was inside watching the scientific drama unfold. She laughed remembering the episode, and pointed out that Michael got the highest score possible that year, and the next — for a project he and Angel dreamed up involving an oscilloscope. She’s clearly proud of Michael’s academic inquisitiveness, and of Anthony’s art and athletic ability. He was selected for varsity swim and wrestling teams in his freshman year in high school, and with the help of Valenzuela, an artist, he’s learned more about working with color, drawing bodies in motion and the use of art as therapy. “Raising five is hard, and every bit of help with the older ones is great”, said Portales, who added that she thinks the whole family has learned from having the boys’ mentors around. “They’ve been part of us.” “We learn just as much”, responded Cabrera, who was hanging out with the family one rainy day before Halloween.
Alum Rock Counseling Center hopes to double the number of mentors in the Turning Point program in coming years. “I really hope this program can help other families as much as it helped us”, said Julie Portales. As for Michael, who is now part of his elementary school’s Gifted and Talented Education program, he’s not sure what he’ll do to top his last two stellar science projects. “This year we won’t do any exploding things,” he said seriously. “As long as it doesn’t explode, it will be OK.”
Wish Book readers can help the Alum Rock Counseling Center with its expansion plans so that more kids like Michael and Anthony can have someone to look up to and learn from as they face the challenges of adolescence. For more information on the Turning Point program of the Alum Rock Counseling Center, go to www.alumrockcc.org.