Chicago's Mentoring Mission Inspires Business to Support Education

Bringing business mentors into the high school classroom has been the passionate pursuit of Carol Valentino-Barry since 2012. She is a former high school business teacher, subcontractor for the Education and Training with the Department of Labor and founder/executive director of Mentoring Mission.

Valentino-Barry saw the disconnect for students between school and the real world and wanted to inspire them to consider all the possibilities that are available for their futures. Her wake-up call was reading the “Lasting Impact Study* – A Business Leader’s Playbook for Supporting American Schools” by the Gates Foundation, The Boston Consulting Group and Harvard Business School.

Mentoring Mission is guided by the findings in Harvard’s Lasting Impact Study and U.S. Competitiveness Research objectives for authentic partnerships between education and business to better prepare tomorrow’s workforce.

In the 2021-22 school year, Mentoring Mission achieved:

Cases in the Classroom at Chicago’s Whitney Young H.S.
Eight classes of high school students at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School analyzed Harvard Business School (HBS) Case Studies with the help and guidance of Mentoring Mission staff, their classroom teachers and volunteer Harvard Business School (and other business school) alumni/mentors who led the final discussion of the cases in Socratic fashion. The real world was brought home to the students in a meaningful way as they studied why Patagonia asked people not to buy their product or what happened on a fateful expedition up Mount Everest. Students also met (via Zoom) a Patagonia executive and had Harvard MBA mentor William Lear who had actually climbed Everest, bring the whole case to life.

The Harvard cases are normally only studied by college or grad students; Harvard Business School is supportive of Mentoring Mission’s efforts to introduce this program into the high school curriculum.

Mock Interviews for Students by Business Mentors at Schurz and Whitney Young
Students from five business classes at Whitney Young Magnet High School and Carl Schurz High School in Chicago participated in mock job interviews with executives from several Chicago-area companies. They worked with their teachers to prepare for these interviews which were coordinated by Mentoring Mission with the help of Junior Achievement.

Choose Aerospace Curriculum for High School Students
Mentoring Mission has been partnering with targeted high schools across the country to introduce aviation maintenance as a possible addition to the curriculum. When Carol Valentino-Barry discovered a few years ago the tremendous need for Aviation Maintenance Technicians (AMTs) and the tremendous opportunity for good jobs, she proceeded to set up the procedures to build pipelines to get high school students into that industry through the Choose Aerospace curriculum

Introducing Schurz H.S. Students to Aviation Maintenance as a Career
Mentoring Mission organized a field trip in November 2021 and another in June 2022 for students from Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School to O’Hare Airport to get them thinking about a career in aviation mechanics.

In June, FedEx AMT Manager Brandon Gosline took students on a journey through the Fed Ex facilities and tool shed. They even opened up a Boeing 767 for real exploration and learning. Gosline answered questions about what the job of an aviation maintenance technician entails. (he had visited Schurz and Boeing’s Dr. Joshua Cummins visited Whitney Young in September 2021: https://patch.com/illinois/chicago/high-school-students-get-inspired-enter-aviation-industry). Students also had the opportunity to visit an airline maintenance school.

Outside Chicago, Mentoring Mission has:

-Facilitated the Choose Aerospace program at a high school outside San Francisco and attracted industry mentors from United Airlines, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Zipline Drones.

-Produced Cases in the Classroom at San Francisco area High School, with a Harvard MBA/Mentor who is currently a writer for Forbes

-Produced Cases in the Classroom at a Jersey City High School with Harvard grad and PhD professor flying in from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to lead the discussion

-Working with a professor/author from Stanford University to introduce study of logic into the high school curriculum as a precursor for working in computer science

-Applying for the Delta Grant from U.S. Dept of Labor to bring the Aviation Maintenance curriculum into high schools in the Delta region which begins in southern Illinois and continues south in the U.S.

Keeping Up with the Aviation Industry
Carol Valentino-Barry attended the Educator's Day at Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture in July and the MRO America's MRO Competition (Maintenance, Repair, Overhaul) in Dallas, Texas in April.

To Get Involved with Mentoring Mission
For more information about getting involved in Mentoring Mission as a sponsor, mentor or school, contact Carol Valentino-Barry at carolvalentinobarry@gmail.com. For more information, visit www.mentoringmission.org.

* Lasting Impact Study - A Business Leader's Playbook for Supporting American Schools" by the Gates Foundation, The Boston Consulting Group and Harvard Business School (part of Harvard Business School's Competitiveness Project). Two thousand Superintendents and CEOs agreed: "We have no shared reality." The time had come for American business leaders to work with the nation's educators to support our schools which would also improve the future economy of the country.

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