James Manning wanted to offer some direction to young men at Kentwood High School.

He wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to do it or which students he would work with, but, Manning was determined to find a way.

What started out as a desire to be a mentor on Manning’s part has developed into a self-sustaining mentorship program for boys and girls at Kentwood known as CHOICES.

“I’m kind of reflective,” Manning said. “I have five kids of my own. So, all these kids were coming into my house… I was wondering if any of those boys were like me. I was a boy who lost his father at 15.”

As he transitioned from adolescence to manhood, Manning said, he didn’t have a strong male figure to offer direction “but I was lucky to have a strong mother.”

As a 20 year veteran of the Seattle Police Department, Manning knows what happens to young men, especially young black men, who don’t have that kind of guidance in their lives.

As a dad, he has a child who graduated from Kentwood and two who are going to school there now.

“I went up to Kentwood High School and I talked to one of the administrators there and asked if I could just come up there and just talk to (students),” Manning said.

He was connected initially with students whose biggest worries were how a B might effect their high GPAs and Manning said he was looking for something different.

Joe Potts, who was an assistant principal at Kentwood then and is now principal at Kentlake, pulled Manning aside.

“He said, ‘James, I’ve got these 10 African American boys, they need some help.’ I said, when can I start?,” Manning said. “I wanted these boys to graduate on time and that was really important to Joe, too. I was looking at the kid that is going to be on the bubble, that possibly needed a push in the right direction and that’s exactly what (Potts) gave me.”

As things began to fall into place, Manning said, he did some research and discovered that 40 percent of black boys graduate from high school and “more African American men are getting their diplomas or GEDs in prison.”

What mattered most to Manning in the beginning was consistency.

“I didn’t want to just do it for one or two years,” he said. “My son was a sophomore, so, what I said is, ‘I’ll give you two more years after my youngest son graduates.’ I knew if I gave that commitment it would really start happening.”

Shaun Martin, an assistant principal at Kentwood, met Manning last year.

Martin, a native of Tennessee, moved to Washington state from Baltimore so he was quite familiar with what Manning was talking about.

“After we talked we connected pretty quickly after my experiences in Baltimore,” Martin said. “James was coming every other week just to mentor these guys… giving them skills and strategies to improve not just their academics but their social skills, how they communicated with their parents and their teachers.”

A year ago Martin and Manning increased the number of students in the program from 10 to nearly 20.

“We started brainstorming how to make this more effective rather than him coming in randomly on Friday mornings,” Martin said. “We came up with a protocol of him meeting with the kids, looking a their grades. After working with some of the guys we decided this could become a mentorship program where the guys who were becoming upperclassmen could turn around in mentoring incoming freshmen.”

As the program grew, Manning was worried, so the idea of taking older boys who had been in the program for a while and developing their skills as mentors and leaders made sense.

“I said, ‘How about we do some kind of thing in the summer?’ and that’s how the three day leadership camp came together,” Manning said. “Watching these young men, these upperclassmen working with the freshmen, that’s been amazing this year. Both sides are learning.”

Martin described the three day camp as “a really cool event.”

“We wanted to make this a leadership program so the guys who went through the mentorship with James, we wanted to build up their skills and competency so they could mentor freshmen,” Martin said. “We invited community members to come in and work with the guys. They came in and sat in small groups with the guys and shared their experiences and had it focused so they would talk not only about leadership but their career paths and barriers along the way.”

The camp culminated in the development and presentation of leadership platforms by the juniors and seniors who participated with those platforms focused on the program’s core values.

“That’s one of the goals of the program, to facilitate that, to put guys in positions where they feel confident but they also are leaders,” Martin said. “We want this to become student driven.”

With the success of the program with boys, assistant principal Deborah Rumbaugh has been working on a program for girls at Kentwood, with the idea to help girls deal with particularly challenging social and emotional issues such as bullying.

There are 15 students who have been invited by counselors and administrators to participate, Rumbaugh said, though the girls program is still in its early stages.

“We focus on grades, getting to graduation and we provide a good role model of what girls can be in their communities if they choose to,” Rumbaugh said. “We have a threefold program, the first is the personal and social development, the second is collaborative enrichment, which is connecting with the community and volunteering, and the third one is academic achievement. Those are pretty lofty goals. We want to see girls really reaching their potential academically, socially and in their communities.”

Like the boys, mentors such as Rumbaugh, King County Prosecutor Stephanie Webb and Kentwood graduate Samantha Thompson (who is Manning’s daughter), will meet weekly with the girls.

“Outside of meeting individually with the girls on a weekly basis, our first activity is to coordinate with a local school district to watch the documentary called ‘Finding Kind’ which focuses on capitalizing on the positive nature of girls in treating each other with kindness and respect,” Rumbaugh said. “The other project that we’re going to be doing is some type of community Christmas project, something like a giving tree, something along those lines. So, we’re always seeking opportunities from the community as well.”

Rumbaugh said one challenge the girls program is facing right now is finding mentors that can make a weekly commitment for the entire school year.

Consistency is important, Manning said, because both boys and girls need to know that mentor is someone they can trust, someone they can count on.

“These kids, these freshmen, they don’t know if I’m going to show up every week,” Manning said. “The older kids know I will and that’s important.”

And he is thrilled the program is now offered to girls.

“That’s so huge,” Manning said. “What I see at the high school, I see girls with very low self esteem, and that’s acted out in the way they dress and the way they act. It’s something that’s important to have someone they can talk to… for these women to come in and have conversations with these girls. This program for the girls is going to be huge and I’m excited for it. There’s different needs (than for the boys) but the end result is going to be the same.”

As the program continues to grow at Kentwood, Manning has a broader goal: he wants to see it offered at all four of the Kent School District’s traditional high schools.

“I want people who live in these communities to help out at the high school that’s around the corner from them,” he said.

He knows it’s working at Kentwood so it could have an impact at other schools, as well.

“When you start hearing the sayings that you give to the kids and it starts coming back to you and they make fun of you with it… that’s when you know they’re getting it,” Manning said. “One of my favorite things I say is, ‘A closed mouth doesn’t get fed.’ Or, ‘Bad news travels fast.’”

One moment really hit Manning and made him realize he was having an impact.

“I was talking to a kid one day trying to get him to talk, something was going on with him,” he said. “One of the seniors was there talking to him, but, we couldn’t get it out of him. The senior said, ‘Look, you can trust Mr. Manning. A couple years ago he and I talked about some issues I had and he is like a second father to me.’ I was like, ‘Wow!’ You hear that and it just kind of hits. That was kind of a ‘wow’ moment for me.”

Martin has seen the impact on his students, as well.

“One junior who has consistently met with Manning on a regular basis since the program’s inception asserts, ‘this is everything to me,’” Martin said. “When asked to say more about his experience, the student says that Manning’s mentorship and friendship has given him strategies for making positive choices. He said, ‘I was bad my freshman year and didn’t have it together, but Officer Manning has helped me with that. He’s been there for me when I need him.’”

Specifically, Martin said, the student pointed out that Manning’s continued guidance and presence has helped him avoid as well as resolve conflicts with students and adults.

“In one class, the student improved his communication with the teacher and his grade jumped from an F to a B,” Martin said. “Another student who was receiving poor grades received mentorship and guidance from Manning, which allowed him to confidently speak to his mother about the matter. She gave him a consequence for the poor effort, but the student reported that the conversation went well, and he liked the tone of the conversation more than the alternative.

One sophomore expressed interest in medicine, particularly cardiothoracic surgery, during the leadership camp. One of our mentors connected with a  surgeon in Seattle and coordinated a meeting between the doctor and the student.”

There are a number of other examples but those are just some highlights, Martin said.

Martin has also been documenting progress of students, both anecdotally and quantitatively by talking to students, as well as evaluating SAT scores and grades.

“It’s by far one of the most powerful things I’ve been a part of, easily,” Martin said. “It’s impacting a lot of kids and impacting the culture of the school.”

Manning couldn’t be happier about the direction of the program.

“I really believe that you have to give back in some way,” he said. “That’s the only way this world is going to get better. The one thing all of us were missing at that time was a little love, someone to say that you’re good enough, that you can do it. When you teach with a lot of love, it really works.”