Education Guide 10.18.26 - Flipbook - Page 12
12
| Sunday, October 18, 2026
Student-Led Mentor Programs Give Tenth Graders
Their First Real Taste of Leadership
Sophomores show eighth graders what’s coming next
By Claire Duarte, Contributing Writer
S
evern School’s middle and
upper schools share a campus. They also run on different
schedules, in different buildings, with different rhythms – close
enough to see, far enough to feel like
a foreign country to an eighth grader
counting down to next fall.
The Middle School Mentor Program
was built to close that distance. It pairs
Severn sophomores with eighth grade
advisories, giving younger students a
direct line to someone who made the
same jump two years earlier.
“The hope was to create a connection between the two divisions and allow
sophomores to be in a position of leadership,” says Joseph Christie, associate
director of admission at Severn and one
of the program’s advisors.
Severn is an independent, coeducational college preparatory day school
about six miles from Annapolis, founded
in 1914 as a prep school for the United
States Naval Academy. Its Teel campus
in the heart of Severna Park houses
grades six through 12; younger students attend the Chesapeake campus
in Arnold. That arrangement puts middle
and upper schoolers within sight of one
another daily, on the same 19 acres,
moving through the same buildings on
schedules that rarely overlap.
The mentor model isn’t new to
the school. Severn’s Prefect program
matches senior leaders with freshman
advisories to help ninth graders find
their footing in high school – learning
the layout, getting involved in the life of
the school, figuring out where they fit.
Prefects embed with those advisories
rather than visiting them, which is the
part that makes it work: the relationship
has time to become ordinary.
The middle school version borrows
that structure and moves it one rung
down. Sophomores explain what the
Upper School actually is, how it operates day to day, and which academic
and social events matter – with the
added goal of building some excitement
about what’s ahead.
Becoming a mentor takes more than
signing up. Sophomores go through an
application process, and those selected
are trained by Lilian Kane, chair of Upper
