First Year Reflection

Chelsey King’s Reflections on Her First Year of Mentoring with Healthy Visions. 

This year has been eye-opening for me.  I’m not from the Reading area myself, I found HV through my Church which is located in Reading.  I wanted to make an impact with my life, and my pastor told me about the Reading School mentoring program.

 I have been mentoring my whole life with having cerebral palsy myself and being confined to a wheelchair. But this was my first year of officially being a mentor to a mentee student.

 I wanted to make an impact on my mentee’s life. Even though at times I felt discouraged by what I learned from Piper’s teachers and mom, they did say her grades improved and she had more school friends and was happier at home.

 Being in a wheelchair, the school helped me adapt to the different physical aspects of the building.

I did not bring up my disability with Piper. When she had questions about it, I answered them and she said my openness about my disability made her more comfortable with people with disabilities.  

I stressed to Piper the importance of accomplishing school work to achieve her goals. Piper is only a freshman but she is aiming her sights on pursuing a vocation in finance because she is good at math.

Healthy Visions provided me a lot of direction. Each week all the mentors received an email detailing what the mentees learned during their weekly in-classroom program. So I had topics and activities I could do with Piper each week during our mentoring session.

 Healthy Visions provided me with a lot of support. I went to the five Healthy Visions training by Dr. Sweeten and Healthy Visions staff that were held on Saturday mornings at my church. Dr. Sweeten’strainingss were insightful.  His talks were supported by Powerpoints. I am a visual learner so seeing the content in addition to hearing it was very helpful. There was always mentor discussion time and I enjoyed hearing what the other mentors had to share about their mentoring experience.  Between the official training and the mentor sharing, I learned a lot of new ways to make the mentoring more effective for me and for Piper.

 I am looking forward to mentoring Piper again this school year.