The Reid Campus Center Ballroom typically serves as an entertainment and informational venue for the students of Whitman College. Last Friday, however, the Ballroom was transformed into a carnival catering to an entirely different crowd. The Whitman Mentor Program sponsored the Mentees to Campus Day, bringing over 100 local elementary and middle school students to Whitman for a fun-filled afternoon of games, activities and performances.

Games at the event included Arm Wrestling, Ring Toss and Pin the Tail on the Donkey; there was also a prize booth to reward participants with a range of toys. Mentees had the chance to play in an enormous Bounce Castle which filled a corner of the room and get their face painted by a group of artistically-inclined volunteers. Ethan, a 9-year-old fourth-grader disguised as a cheetah, did not have a favorite booth in particular, but said he was having fun just being there for the afternoon with his mentor, first-year Abby McCoy.

The Whitman Mentor Program has 150 committed mentors this year, its biggest group so far, according to co-director Amy Strauss. The program aims to provide reliable sources of friendship to kids who have been designated as “at-risk” in some capacity by a school counselor. Mentors visit schools weekly, having lunch with their mentees and playing with them during recess. While it may seem that mentees would be singled out and perhaps ridiculed for this special status, “kids beg to get mentors” when they see the relationships fostered by the program, Strauss said.

Mentees to Campus Day provides an opportunity for mentees to hang out with their mentors outside their typical space. While the event is not specifically geared towards advertising higher education, the kids do get a glimpse of a college environment before they have even entered high school. Also, it’s just one more way for the Walla Walla community to get involved with Whitman, and vice versa, according to Strauss.

The elementary and middle-school students gain role models in the process: as Junior mentor Onon Bayasgalan noted, her mentee “looks up to me.” But the benefits go both ways, with many Whitman students expressing a sense of fulfillment resulting from their participation in the event. Volunteers at the face-painting booth enjoyed connecting with the kids on a one-on-one basis. Whitman Club EEK, which stands for Environmental Education for Kids, had a unique booth aimed at teaching kids about the food chain through art. The kids were challenged to draw environmental lessons from the pictures they drew, and junior member Courtney Fitzpatrick said, “It was cool to see them work through it.”