Once a year, 150 grade school and middle school students stampede into Reid Campus Center for a carnival organized by Whitman’s Mentor Program which places Whitman students in local public schools to mentor at-risk kids.

Mentees to Campus Day originally started as a scavenger hunt but has grown into an event large enough to hire a rental company to help set up and provide equipment such as a bouncy castle. This year’s event, on Friday, Feb. 11, included games, prizes and performances by the Testostertones and Whitman’s dance team.

Mentor-volunteers are paired with a mentee at the beginning of the year. Once a week, mentors meet their mentee during lunch and recess.

Mentees to Campus Day provides an opportunity to strengthen the mentor-mentee relationship outside of school. Justin, a mentee taking a break from the carnival festivities, says he likes to play wall ball and read with his mentor, senior Viral Oza.

“He plays with me when I don’t have anyone else to play with at school,” said Justin.

The program started as a senior thesis project in 1992 with around 10 mentors. Now the program has 150 mentors who visit every Walla Walla grade school and middle school, totaling eight schools in all. The program is entirely student-run and is currently headed by three interns. They budget, assign mentors and organize the carnival setup and cleanup.

“I think the program is at a point right now where it can’t expand anymore,” said mentor program intern Rachel Sicheneder. The program will likely stay at the record size it reached this year, according to Sicheneder.

Though the program has reached its desired size, recruiting efforts are still made. Intern Andrew Matschiner said that one of the biggest recruiting challenges “. . . is getting more men to participate.”

Barbara Thatcher, an intervention specialist at Green Park Elementary who helps assign mentors to mentees, has been with the program for eight years. According to Thatcher, mentor program interns have done more over the years to better the program like monitoring mentor attendance.

“It’s gotten a lot more organized,” she said.

In the last few years, mentor program interns have done more training with mentors and have held meetings with school counselors and intervention specialists. This year some mentors received training for working with children with special needs, according to Thatcher.

Thatcher says that Whitman students’ personalities make a difference in creating good matches.

“It seems like the Whitman students are really energetic,” she said.

The great match can go two ways; First-year Morgan Walker, a mentor, explained that she enjoys playing recess games.

“It’s a really great way to get time away from campus,” Walker said. “You get to take an hour a week to play with kids at recess. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?”

Mentors may help kids by talking with them at lunch and playing recess games, but the effect goes beyond that.

“They’re not asking anything from you except to be your friend,” said Sicheneder.

Several years of mentoring can, of course, create great friendships. Or, as simply put by Noah Lerner’s mentee Jeremy, “We just hang out.”