After several years of club dormancy, the Big Atoms, Little Atoms (BALA) program will begin again. BALA is a program intended to help facilitate the transition for eighth graders into high school.
Thanks to the leadership of counselors Rebecca Lockard and Stacie Shaffer, the program has blossomed into a large and united initiative to help smooth eighth graders’ transition into high school.
“Middle-schoolers struggle with the size of the school, number of students – the sheer presence of people,” Shaffer said. “The expectations of the classes, and rules in general.”
With the added pressures in mind, both Lockard and Shaffer realized that a role model was needed to help guide new students through the trials of high school.
“The vision behind it was to really help our freshmen students adjust and transition to high school,” Lockard said. “[BALA] was one of the best ways we thought they could better relate to.”
Both believe that incoming freshmen could easily relate to those close to their age, as opposed to adult mentors, whom many students may not connect to as easily as peers.
“I think it sounds like a really great way to get eighth graders comfortable with coming to high school,” junior Kelcie Chandler said.
Lockard and Shaffer are looking to start the program with AHS’ feeder middle schools’ (Poe MS and Holmes MS) current eighth grade class.
“We’re hoping to make a connection before the eighth graders come to AHS so they can form a relationship before coming to high school,” Lockard said.
BALA mentors attended an in-school field trip on Jan. 12. Fairfax County held a county-wide meeting to kickstart AHS’ mentoring program.
“We literally started a week ago,” junior Berket Yemaneberhane, a Big Atom, said.“We did training and we talked about how other schools’ mentoring programs worked, and how we could make ourselves better mentors.”
BALA aims to begin pairing students with their mentors and arranging formal meetings (hopefully) during W4 and Atom Time. Both sponsors hope that high school mentors will develop closer relationships with their Little Atoms on their own.
“During my freshman year, I didn’t know what to do, or what extracurricular activities to be involved in,” Yemaneberhane said. “Giving them an opportunity to know what to classes to take and helping them move to high school will be really good and help them to become better high school students.”
