Filled with hope

For Jay County kids, one is not the loneliest number.

"It's the one on one on one concept which is one mentor, one child, one school, one church, one hour, once a week," said Gary Maitlen, director of Jay County's Kids Hope mentoring program, which has been pairing elementary school kids with mentors for five years.

At the group's fourth annual banquet Tuesday night at Jay County High School, mentors and kids had something more to celebrate than another year of success. They could celebrate the fact that now the entire county is involved.

"We have 85 kids in the program," Maitlen said. "We have all seven (elementary) schools and eight churches. ... This year we added Westlawn. That's the one we hadn't found a church for yet."

The program helps pair up kids who need an extra hand - kids from single parent households, kids having trouble with schoolwork, or kids who are shy - with mentors from area churches who spend an hour per week helping out with homework and just being a friend.

And so far, Maitlen thinks, the program has been a complete success.

"The stories we hear from the kids and their parents and the mentors are just touching and heartbreaking and everyone one of them is positive," he said.

"One of my mentors said, the one kid finally admitted to his mentor he was afraid his grades were getting so much better, he was afraid that if he got too good of grades, he was going to get dropped from the program and he wasn't going to have his buddy any more," Maitlen recalled of how the children get attached to their mentors.

"Great, fabulous," said Patty Paulson, the Northern Indiana state representative for Kids Hope, of the county's program. "I am so pleased with the number of community partnerships that I see among eight churches and all of the Jay County public elementary schools."

Paulson, who works with both schools and churches to try to set up new programs, said Jay County is running at 100 percent.

In the area, Blackford County, where Paulson is from, and Muncie Community Schools are the only others that have hit full stride.

Now, she's working with neighboring Randolph County to get a program up and running there.

"Kudos to Gary Maitlen and all the wonderful directors and churches who have chosen to underwrite this program and support it through their dollars and loving church members," she said.

So as kids, mentors, parents and church members chowed down from an expansive buffet - put together by local donations and efforts - and enjoyed the impressive and funny act of world-class juggler David Cain at the banquet, Maitlen just hopes to see more faces in the program next year.

"I think we've got a few churches right now that are pretty small and they've already admitted that they could use another church to partner with them," he said. "Most of the schools you get up around 20, 22. That's all they want to deal with. So if we could get all of schools into around the 20 range that would be good, if we can just keep it going and keep the numbers up."[[In-content Ad]]