by Julie Dodd
JEA Mentoring Committee co-chair

Getting ready for publication -- This is page 2 of JEA Mentoring Matters, Spring 2010 edition, with my sticky-note edits.

The Spring 2010 edition of JEA Mentoring Matters is almost completed. Linda Barrington, the newsletter editor and committee co-chair, is completing the last pages. The newsletter will be e-mailed to the mentors, the JEA board and others before the JEA/NSPA convention in Portland in less than two weeks.

I’m helping Linda by editing the pages. (Isn’t it great how Linda can be in Wisconsin and I can be in Florida and we can swap files electronically faster than we could walk the printed pages down the hall to each other even if we were in the same school.)

One page of the newsletter (screen capture included in in this post) features the story of Patty Turley (Oregon mentor) and her mentee Gary Enoch and the difference a Newspaper Association of America Foundation Student/Newspaper Partnership Grant has made for Gary’s program at Illinois Valley High School in southern Oregon.

The grant is from $5,000 to $7,500 to help journalism programs in rural schools, urban schools and schools with a majority-minority population. We’re fortuante to have former high school newspaper adviser Sandy Woodcock as director of NAAF, as she is a real advocate for high school media programs.

The deadline for applying for funding for 2010-2011 is April 15.

When I realized that in reading the story, I thought, “Some of our mentees could be eligible for these grants. And some of the mentors might know of schools we could add to the mentoring program with the help of these grants.”

So I decided to post to the blog to help get the word out.

If you are a new journalism adviser or a high school teacher who would be interested in applying for the NAAF grant but don’t have a journalism background, please contact us. Through the JEA Mentoring Program, we have experienced journalism advisers working with new journalism teachers in 14 states. So we may be able to match you with a mentor.