Winter Wonderful Feature Story
Frost MusicReach
The Frost MusicReach Mentorship Program uses music as a motivating tool to encourage teens to graduate from high school and continue on to college.
Recent research by the Rand Corporation and others suggests that MUSIC is more effective than sports or any other school activity in keeping kids enrolled in school.
The Frost MusicReach program collaborates with the Greater Miami Youth Symphony to provide safe and fun music instruction on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus for motivated at-risk 7th graders from the Miami-Dade region, pairing them with freshman music majors from the Frost School of Music who mentor them for four years!
Learning to play a musical instrument provides three key elements that are essential for successful learning:
1. Risk-taking/public performance
2. Hands-on learning
3. Consistent and ongoing mentoring from a caring adult
At the current time, there are 18 freshman and sophomore Frost Music-Reach mentors receiving outreach scholarship stipends. They mentor over 40 at-risk students from the Greater Miami region.
Proceeds from Winter Wonderful! will help to scholarship dozens of NEW mentors beginning in 2012—for four years each—inspiring and teaching 40 NEW teens toward their pursuit of excellence. The benefits are lifelong, and proven.
All participating Frost students receive mentoring training from Arts for Learning and their activities are supervised by Frost School’s assistant dean for undergraduate studies, Ken Moses, and Dean Shelton Berg.
