Minority high school youth nurture middle-schoolers in a Tigard-Tualatin mentor program | OregonLive.com

Minority high school youth nurture middle-schoolers in a Tigard-Tualatin mentor program | OregonLive.com

Minority high school youth nurture middle-schoolers in a Tigard-Tualatin mentor program

By Melissa Navas, The Oregonian

April 02, 2010, 9:00PM

View full sizeFredrick D. Joe / The OregonianIntercambio students participate in ice breakers and skits to learn about the qualities of good leaders. Most students in the mentoring program are Latino; which is the district's largest minority group. Jose Gutierrez, left, a senior at Tigard High School, said, "There are not many Latino students who are seen doing good things. People don't even know about us. That's why I had to step up. All my classmates, we've been doing pretty good stuff in the community."TIGARD -- Jose Gutierrez watched as kids in his East Los Angeles neighborhood strayed from school and found trouble. Their actions reinforced the stereotypes he heard while growing up: Latino students were lazy and didn't care about academics.

"I thought it was kind of a tradition that Latinos didn't graduate high school," Gutierrez said.

He still battles these notions today because he knows some people think his Latino surname, brown skin and dark hair destine him for failure. If there's one thing this 18-year-old senior hopes to impart on younger students is that those ideas are a bunch of baloney.

Gutierrez is part of a new mentoring program for students of color in theTigard-Tualatin School District that pairs high school students with at-risk middle schoolers once a week. Intercambio, which means "exchange" in Spanish, began in the fall using federal grant money and aims to boost