At 3 p.m. on a Tuesday in March, Clarence Mundell, a sophomore at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in East Baltimore, is staying after school to study for an American government test. For the past four months he's been upholding a marathon schedule: He's up at six in the morning, off to school until three, then with a tutor until basketball practice. He gets home at 10 p.m. Clarence's average grade for the year is almost 80 percent. He hopes to win a basketball scholarship that will take him to college, following in the footsteps of basketball legends Muggsy Bogues and Reggie Lewis, both Dunbar alumni.

It's hard to believe that last year, Clarence failed five out of eight of his classes. He was barred from playing basketball, and was on the verge of being kicked out of Dunbar, a magnet school that specializes in the sciences, and moved back to a regional zone school. "I was coming to school and just, like, playing around, cutting class, not turning in homework," he says. "Then IMP came along."

IMP is the Incentive Mentoring Program, which works with students who have failed at least half of their freshman year classes, and who face psychosocial challenges such as gang violence, abuse or neglect, or a burdensome financial obligation to their household. Clarence is guarded about much of his personal history. He's big for a 16-year-old, with strong, tattooed arms and the beginnings of scruff on his face. From his tough and silent facade, you get the feeling that he's seen plenty of the problems that plague Baltimore's youth.

IMP's founder is Sarah Hemminger, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins. Pale skinned, with soft brown hair and a serious face, Hemminger is a native of suburban Indianapolis. She started the program one day in 2004 by simply knocking on Dunbar's doors and asking for the school's most troubled students. "I said, I want the kids who failed all their freshman classes first semester," she says. "Give me the kids that you think are going to be out of here come June." She asked for ten; she ended up with fifteen.

Sarah's motivation was personal. Her husband, Ryan Hemminger, ran into trouble in his freshman year in high school, when his mother got in a car accident that left her temporarily disabled. The family went on welfare, his mother started selling her prescribed painkillers (among other drugs), and Ryan began failing his classes. "The funny thing was," Sarah says, "I met him as a senior, when he was an A/B student, and he was on his way to the Naval Academy."

Sarah credits Ryan's turnaround to "a complete miracle from God" and two more-earthly things: a committed and caring group of teachers who took a holistic approach to getting his life on track, and Ryan's determination. "He was just the strongest person I think I'd ever met in my whole life," she says.

At the first meeting of IMP, Hemminger flew solo, using pizza as the incentive for a group of kids who, she says, didn't want to be there. "I explained to them that no matter what they did to me, I wasn't going to go away, so they might as well get on board," she says. "Basically what I did was stalk them. If they didn't show up to school, I drove to their house and I picked them up."

Today, IMP assigns each student a "family" of five to eight volunteers (mostly students from Hopkins Medical School or the School of Public Health) that keeps track of him or her nearly twenty-four hours a day. IMP families will do everything from tutoring to driving students to school to taking them camping or to the movies. Sarah Orao, the American government teacher at Dunbar, calls it "Big Brothers Big Sisters on steroids," referring to the organization that pairs youth one-to-one with mentors.

Matt Czarny, a second-year Hopkins med student, is the "Head of Household" of Clarence's family. Early in the school year, he called Clarence's mother every couple of nights and drove out to their house to deal with school paperwork. These days, his main job is "making sure everybody is doing what they need to be doing." David Gorkin, a first-year Ph.D. student and one of Clarence's tutors, says he tries to act like a "school coach," giving him "drills" for his mind. "I'm trying to get him to understand that improving your mind will drive you in your life and take you where you need to go," says Gorkin.

The program graduated its first class—the original fifteen students from 2004—last year. Fourteen of them are now attending either two- or four-year universities; the fifteenth starts in the fall. Clarence is part of IMP's second class, this one of sixteen students. The program is now trying to raise the money to add a new class of students every year, and to extend the program to other schools in Baltimore.

Dunbar principal Stephen Colbert supports the effort: "If something like this could be duplicated, if the city could invest money in more programs like IMP, the school system as a whole would be much better off." But funding isn't easy to come by for mentoring programs, where results are not easily quantified. And while IMP is currently batting 100 percent, it would have a tougher time in other Baltimore schools; to get into Dunbar, even its fifteen most "at-risk" students had to prove themselves academically.

For Clarence, the struggle was nonetheless considerable, and the results, remarkable. Asked if he remembers the first time he got back a really good grade on a high school test, his face, with all its toughness, lights up. "Yes!" he says. "It was a 100, on my American government test." He laughs, and shakes his head. "It feels good."

—Rebecca Messner



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