Laptops help school children learn and stay connected in midst of COVID-19

First-year medical student Nathan Lawera has used Facetime and phone calls to check in regularly with his mentee, Romendo Sims, a second-grader at Rockdale Elementary School in Cincinnati.

Social distancing may be essential for our health, but it doesn’t stop University of Cincinnati medical students like Lawera from finding ways to stay connected with the youths they have befriended. Lawera is part of UC Med Mentors, a volunteer mentorship effort in the College of Medicine that connects 200 medical students with 100 school-age mentees.  He is co-president of the organization with fellow medical student Maura Kopchak.

The organization works closely with the Cincinnati Youth Collaborative (CYC) to train mentors and link them to Cincinnati Public School children for mentorship. On Friday, April 17, Med Mentors gifted 20 laptops to schoolchildren between noon and 2 p.m. It replaces the special annual ceremony in the College of Medicine which has been canceled.

Instead parents drove into nearby Kresge Circle with their child to pick up a laptop and posed for a quick photo, all the time keeping the required 6-foot-social distancing, with appropriate masks and handsantizer.

The generous gift of laptops for these schoolchildren is the result of $10,000 in funding from the Clare Family Foundation and medical staff at Cincinnati Children’s, says Charles Cavallo, MD, president of the advisory board for UC Med Mentors and volunteer assistant professor in the UC Department of Pediatrics.

“We recognize the need with a greater emphasis on distance learning in the midst of COVID-19,” says Cavallo. “Kids are at a disadvantage if they don’t have laptops. The computers come with Microsoft programing packages installed.”

UC Med Mentors was founded in 2001 by Wan Lim, PhD, associate professor emeritus of medical education. Mentees come from various schools including several near the College of Medicine, such as North Avondale Montessori School, Clifton Fairview German School, South Avondale School and Rockdale Academy. The mentoring effort at UC targets students in grades three through six, though some students stay with Med Mentors for longer periods.

Keith Stringer, MD, faculty advisor for Med Mentors, says Med Mentors offers medical students a way to interact with the community and offers a great opportunity firsthand to see the realities for some of their future patients.

“I am a pediatric pathologist and we are in the business of finding causes for disease,” said Stringer, an assistant professor in the UC College of Medicine’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s pathologist. “It really has been recognized more and more in recent years that to understand the mechanisms of disease you have to understand the social constructs and determinants. In so many cases it is the social determinants of health that are unfortunately the cause of many of the ailments we see in patients.”

Cavallo said that schoolchildren in Med Mentors show improvements in school attendance and achievement.

Med Mentors has focused on preparing students for academic success, but mentors also expose students to cultural and extracurricular activities through visits to the museum, the Cincinnati Zoo, arts functions, field trips, sports functions and just plain fun. For Lawera, his time with his mentee offers a welcomed break from the rigors of medical school. He also has a co-mentor, Emilie Buisson, a fellow medical student.