It’s lunch time, and the cafeteria is abuzz with the chatter of hundreds of adolescents at Cougar Mountain Middle School outside of Seattle. But at one table, the mood feels different. Here, 7th grader Mateo Sanchez-Hernandez sits slightly hunched, staring at the chess board in front of him. Seated directly across from Mateo, his opponent quietly waits for him to make his next move. Classmates gather behind the two chess players, talking in hushed tones and watching intently.
A few minutes later, the bell rings, and lunch period ends. Mateo leans across the table and shakes hands with his chess partner, then heads out of the cafeteria with a few classmates. Mateo’s opponent, Bob Fritz, sticks around to field some questions about chess from other middle schoolers interested in learning the game.
The 83-year-old retired engineer and middle school volunteer who lives at Timber Ridge, the senior living community adjacent to the school, isn’t in a hurry. “These kids are a joy to be around,” Fritz said. “Doing this keeps me going.”
When Fritz and Mateo were matched through VOICE—the Issaquah school district’s mentoring program that connects volunteers with students for one-on-one social, emotional, and academic support—Mateo was new to the area. He’d usually eat lunch in the cafeteria alone.
Since then, Fritz has encouraged Mateo to get involved in extracurricular activities like wrestling, where he’s made friends. Their own relationship has grown, too, transcending the typical social boundaries of adolescence.
“I think of him like a friend,” Mateo said of Fritz. “We like to spend time with each other playing chess.”
The feeling is mutual. “You should have seen Mateo the first day he beat me. He had the biggest grin on his face,” Fritz said.
Fritz is one of about a dozen residents from neighboring Timber Ridge who volunteers regularly at Cougar Mountain Middle School. Some, like Fritz, are VOICE mentors, who meet weekly with their mentees. Another founded Yarn Buddies, one of the school’s most popular after-school clubs. One works weekly with small groups of band and orchestra students.
Students and Timber Ridge residents regularly walk to and from each other’s campuses for theater and music productions and other events. The trek is made easier because of a sky bridge that connects the school’s main building to a bus loop just a stone’s throw from Timber Ridge.
No one could have predicted the impact these neighbors would have on one another. Before the middle school opened in 2022, students and staff were excited about its state-of-the-art amenities: the airy new gymnasium, a big library with an unobstructed view of the mountains, ample staff parking. Few thought about their neighbors in the senior community or what they might have to offer.
But in just a few short years, Timber Ridge residents have played an indispensable role in the lives of their middle school neighbors and vice versa.
“I love witnessing the intergenerational energy. Our volunteers are older than the kids’ grandparents. They show them these things from when they were kids, and the kids are genuinely interested,” said Laura Berry, the school librarian and faculty moderator of Yarn Buddies, the after-school club teaching students to knit that was started by Harriet Arkley, a Timber Ridge resident.
“They don’t have any walls up. The volunteers are happy to share. The students are happy to learn,” Berry said. “It benefits everybody.”
A natural way to grow adolescents’ social-emotional skills
The middle school years can challenge even the most seemingly well-adjusted and confident of students. As they transition from children to teens, adolescents often wrestle with their identity, self-worth, and relationships. Social-emotional competencies, such as the ability to feel and show empathy for others and maintain supportive relationships, prove key to adolescents’ maturation process, say experts.
Intergenerational partnerships, such as those that bring together school-age students and older adults, provide a natural way to grow children’s social-emotional skills. Research bears this out.
In a review of 10 years’ worth of studies on intergenerational programs that consisted of ongoing, organized interactions between school-age students and older adults, researchers identified several benefits to students: a more positive attitude toward older adults, improved school attendance, greater confidence, and stronger social skills.
For instance, the AARP Foundation’s Experience Corps pairs older volunteers as tutors with elementary-age children struggling to read at grade level for an entire school year. The foundation tracked the reading and social-emotional-learning progress of 101 students at nine schools who were enrolled in the tutoring program during the 2018-19 school year. By the year’s end, in addition to reading progress, students showed significant improvements in SEL assessment scores, especially in the areas of personal responsibility, relationship skills, and decisionmaking.
Notably, the students enrolled in the program started the school year at high risk of developing social-emotional problems compared with their peers nationally and ended it almost on par with national norms.
Such partnerships that are “deep and ongoing” are most likely to be effective, according to data from Generations United, a nonprofit that advocates policies and practices that benefit all generations.
“The real benefit [of intergenerational partnerships] is the relationships that people build with each other across those generations,” said Sheri Y. Steinig, the director of strategic initiatives and communications at Generations United. “But staff must be prepared to help facilitate those interactions. You just can’t throw an older person and a younger person in a room and say, ‘go for it.’”
Easy, routine access: a key ingredient to a successful intergenerational partnership
In our age-segmented society, people from different generations have fewer opportunities to interact than in years past, when extended family members of varying ages often lived with, or at least near, one another. School and senior living campuses tend to be built on isolated plots of land, which makes interactions and volunteer opportunities logistically challenging.
Not so at Cougar Mountain Middle. As construction on the school took place, residents of Timber Ridge watched from their windows with interest. One resident, Werner Henn, documented the construction process via video camera and posted the progress on social media, garnering excitement among the residents about their new neighbors, said Erin McKee, the middle school’s principal.
Henn eventually became a VOICE mentor at the middle school. “He was the genesis of this partnership,” McKee said.
McKee was also eager to facilitate the connection. The principal taught in Japan early in her career, where she witnessed preschools operating in buildings that doubled as residents for older adults, a setup that helped foster interaction between the two groups. So when Cougar Mountain’s doors opened and Arkley, the Timber Ridge resident and a former elementary school principal, welcomed the school staff with a batch of homemade cookies and asked how she could get involved, McKee saw possibilities.
Four years later, an established and growing corps of older volunteers has committed their time and talents in several ways: facilitating after-school clubs, providing individualized instruction to small groups of students, mentoring students, and more.
For example, three Timber Ridge residents currently serve as mentors to middle school students through the districtwide program, VOICE, which stands for volunteers of Issaquah changing education.
“It’s really just about building relationships with somebody outside of school, with no biases,” said Brad Grow, one of two school counselors at Cougar Mountain. “Someone in their corner.”
The support mentors provide can be academic or social, depending on the students’ needs. Generally, about 10 to 15 Cougar Mountain students receive this one-on-one mentorship during an academic year; this year, 12 students are enrolled. Sometimes, the relationship lasts longer than a year; at least one former VOICE mentor from Timber Ridge has continued a supportive relationship with their mentee into the high school years.
There’s no hard-and-fast equation regarding which students pair with mentors. Staff members who interact routinely with students may refer a middle schooler to the program, and participation is voluntary. As a counselor, Grow said he has come to see the mentors as an added resource.
Students “might share pretty intimate things with a mentor, if they’re really hurting,” Grow said. “Then I can reach out to families and make sure it’s on their radar.”
Older adults find acceptance among adolescents
The partnership has allowed Timber Ridge residents to showcase their own talents and skills to a new generation.
Eighty-five-year-old Arkley, the former elementary school principal, had never worked closely with middle school students and wasn’t sure what to expect when she started Yarn Buddies, the after-school knitting club.
“There’s a sentiment out there about middle schoolers that they’re really hard to work with, that you have to be a special person,” she said. “But they’re just human beings, and kids, and they have all the same attributes and deficits as the rest of us.”
What came as a surprise to Arkley is how prone to silliness adolescents are. “That’s a draw for me,” she said. “And a contrast with where we live.”
Overall, Arkley said the easy rapport and ability to teach students something they’re interested in learning feels like what most teachers dream about their whole careers. “It’s a beautiful way to end a life in education,” she said.
Rainier An, an 8th grader who joined Yarn Buddies with some initial ambivalence and has since knitted a coat for his dog, said he’s been surprised at how enjoyable he’s finding the experience.
The older volunteers “just knit alongside us, and it’s fun to talk with them. We tell stories and we just talk while we’re knitting,” the adolescent said.
Eric Leberg, a 79-year-old Timber Ridge resident and retired social worker, volunteers with the school’s band and orchestra and continually impresses students with his seemingly endless ability to play multiple instruments. He wasn’t worried that he’d be able to teach students to become better musicians when he signed on to volunteer. But he admits that he wasn’t sure how willing students would be to learn from someone his age.
He no longer worries about it. “I walk around the school, and the students say, ‘Hi Mr. Leberg.’ It’s total acceptance,” he said.
Fritz, the VOICE mentor, feels that acceptance from his mentee, Mateo, too. And he has a hunch why.
“I’m not here to tell him what to do,” he said. “I’m here to be his friend, to help him out where he needs it, and just to have a good time.”
