About Teen Trendsetters
Mentoring: A key ingredient
Teen Trendsetters™ Reading Mentors is a free, award-winning program that recruits and trains high school students to mentor elementary students in reading. This one-on-one mentoring does more than help elementary students improve their reading skills — it also forges a rewarding relationship for the third-graders and a lasting sense of achievement and responsibility for their teen mentors.
The majority of school districts in Florida have an active Teen Trendsetters™ Reading Mentors program, which was created in 2002 by the Volunteer Florida Foundation in partnership with Florida Trend Next, a magazine for high school students published by Florida Trend. The program’s numbers speak to its effectiveness: There are more than 2,300 Teen Trendsetter Reading Mentors statewide and a remarkable volunteer retention rate of more than 90 percent.
Select teens are thoroughly prepared for mentoring and are trained to work with BrainStorm™, a specialized 40-minute curriculum. Developed by the Volunteer Florida Foundation in cooperation with Scholastic, BrainStorm™ includes three topic areas, each with a 10-session, skill-based student magazine, a comprehensive tutor guide and books that become part of the elementary student’s home library. Teens meet with their third-grade students once a week for a minimum of 20 weeks during the school year.