Staying in touch

He was the bright-eyed fourth-grader with a penchant for Legos, a kid who was maybe a little unsure of himself, who lost his father to prison three years earlier.

She was the ex-college soccer player, who had come home to Eugene after landing a job in the University of Oregon athletic department.

Katie Harbert was also, quite clearly, not a man.

“Not a lie — I wanted a male mentor at first,” says Garrett Banks, now 15, sitting on the turf field at Cal Young Middle School. “But Katie’s a great mentor. She helped me out with my homework, even when I didn’t want to.”

Harbert, a 2000 Marist High School graduate who went on to play soccer at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and now serves as the UO’s assistant athletic director for student athlete development, has helped Garrett with more than his homework.

During almost six years of mentorship through the Pleasant Hill-based Patrick McCurdy Education Foundation’s Reaching Out Mentoring Program, she’s helped Garrett grow into a confident teenager dreaming about majoring in engineering at Oregon State University. He’s even trying out for football for the first time this fall at Pleasant Hill High School.

“She’s a great role model,” Garrett says, taking a break on Tuesday during his latest stint volunteering to help younger kids at former UO three-sport star Jordan Kent’s multisport skill camps. “She’s always positive. She’s always looking for new solutions to problems. She doesn’t give up.”

Harbert meets weekly with Garrett during the school year but stopped by to say hello Tuesday during the four-day camp that ends today. It’s the fourth of five Jordan Kent Skill Camps that Garrett will volunteer for this spring and summer.

It’s just one more thing to build his confidence, Harbert says.

“He’s a great kid,” she says. “He’s always been a great kid.”

Sure, he’s older now, but “it’s still important to have a caring adult” in his life, Harbert says. “I just made a commitment to him.”

Male mentors lacking

One of the reasons Harbert was matched with Garrett is a lack of available male mentors in the program, says Susie Rexius, program coordinator for the Reaching Out Mentoring Program that aims to help at-risk youth.

The program was started a decade ago by Katie Barr, the former Pleasant Hill High English teacher who started the Patrick McCurdy Education Foundation, named for her husband, a former guidance counselor at Pleasant Hill High. He was killed in the Highway 58 car crash that she survived on March 17, 2003.

Barr, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, also lost her 2-year-old daughter, Olivia, in the crash, caused when a pickup driven by a 17-year-old boy crossed the highway’s centerline.

“When I started the mentoring program, I saw myself in these wounded souls,” Barr told former Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch in 2008. “And to watch them blossom and overcome incredible obstacles gave me the power to feel I could, too. The foundation is no longer a story about Patrick and Olivia and me. It’s about these students and their futures and who they’re becoming.”

But the program almost died last year after a partnership with Committed Partners for Youth of Lane County folded in November.

After years of fundraisers, of subsisting on grants and donations, much of it donated in the wake of McCurdy’s death, funding had dried up, Rexius says. That’s why the foundation reached out to Committed Partners for Youth, whose demise left the McCurdy foundation mentoring program in a lurch.

A grant from the Chambers Family Foundation in December provided enough money to get through the school year, and then came the news this past spring that the Pleasant Hill School District, for the first time, would fund the mentoring program with a budget line item of about $30,000.

The state is providing additional funding for full-day kindergarten that debuts in the 2015-16 school year, and that has freed up some funding for other causes, according to Pleasant Hill Superintendent Tony Scurto.

Barr had always hoped the school district would see enough value in the Reaching Out Mentoring Program to fund it, says Rexius, who is the program’s only employee.

Funding essentially goes to pay her salary, says Dennis Biggerstaff, a former principal at Pleasant Hill, Churchill and North Eugene high schools, and now executive director of the Patrick McCurdy Education Foundation.

“There’s a good chance we wouldn’t have been back (this coming school year)” if not for the school district deciding to fund the program, Biggerstaff says.

A lasting bond

Meanwhile, Harbert and Garrett will continue a connection that may have initially seemed a mismatch to him but has proved serendipitous.

“He and Katie just have a bond,” says Garrett’s mother, Michelle Banks, a school bus driver and trainer for Eugene-based First Student. Her daughter, Emily, 16, has also been mentored through the Reaching Out Mentoring Program and is now thriving as a 4-H state ambassador.

Garrett has had no contact with his father since he was convicted of sexually abusing an underage girl and sentenced to prison in 2007. He was released last year, Michelle Banks says.

“He hardly ever talks about that,” says Harbert, who volunteered to become a mentor because her husband, W.C. Harbert, was a program coordinator for the mentoring program.

“Yeah, I’ll talk about it if a friend brings it up,” Garrett says. “I’ll just say, ‘Yeah, he’s not in my life.’”

But he has other male role models, including Kent, who grew up in Eugene and went on to a brief pro football career with the Seattle and St. Louis.

“Jordan is a very good role model,” says Garrett, who arrives at 7:30 a.m. when he helps out at Kent’s multi-sport camps that teach younger kids the basics of football, basketball and soccer. “He’s a very animated personality. He’s never negative. He’s a great guy to be around.”

Kent, who likes to call Garrett “G-money,” returns the compliment: “He was so eager to help out,” Kent says of when Garrett first volunteered to fill water coolers, set up activities and encourage the younger kids two summers ago.

“At the drop of a hat, he was ready to do something,” says Kent, who connected with Garrett through Rexius after Kent spoke in Creswell about the importance of mentoring during a fundraiser for the mentoring program. “It’s such a joy to have him out here, someone I can trust.”

Helping the younger kids is a “pretty nice feeling,” Garrett says. “It gives me a feeling of importance, which can sometimes be hard to feel or accomplish.”

Harbert says Garrett has “always been one of the most polite boys I’ve ever known.” When she first began working with him during weekly visits to Pleasant Hill Elementary School, she was impressed that he always opened doors for her.

She still helps him with his homework. The boy who once loathed math is getting ready for Algebra II during his upcoming sophomore year of high school.

And they still talk about the wisdom of choosing friends, or how he’s getting along with certain teachers, or, sometimes, just life issues in general.

Harbert says she will be there for him as long as he’s OK with that.

“She’s just so nice,” Garrett says. “Very kind.”