A program for older adults to mentor students was around for 37 years. Suddenly, it’s gone

By John Murphy

Click here for updates on this story

    COLUMBIA, Missouri (KOMU) — As parents and families make final preparations for the start of the new school year, classrooms across mid-Missouri will look different this year. Not because of a change of homeroom, teacher or dry erase boards, but because a staple program that allowed older adults with low incomes to come to elementary schools across mid-Missouri to mentor students and help teachers is no more.

This stood to mark the end of a 23-year journey for Phillis Jones.

“I think it’s important for the kids. You don’t know what kind of home life they have, and you might be the only smile they see that day,” she said.

Jones is the longest serving foster grandma in central Missouri. She’s been working with Vernetta Cowans in her kindergarten class at Benton Elementary School in Columbia for the past 10 years.

During that span, Jones would go to school for half the day, every day of the week to be a grandma for the children there. The Columbia Missourian profiled Jones in a documentary it published last December.

Jones said the hardest part of her job over the past decade was explaining to the kids that she had to stay in kindergarten and wouldn’t move on to first grade with them.

“It’s hard to see them go. And then, when I tell them that I’m not coming back, that I’m going to be in kindergarten, that I’m not going to go to first grade with you, well then they’re very upset about that,” Jones said. “And then, I had one little girl said, ‘Grandma, I’m so sorry you didn’t make it.’ That was a good one.”

But the hardest part now is keeping her job around.

The foster grandparent program was federally run by AmeriCorps Seniors. It provided a small payment of $4 an hour for older adults with low incomes to go to elementary schools during the school year and serve as an aide to teachers and a mentor to students. Central Missouri Community Action facilitated the program in mid-Missouri.

This summer, CMCA said the grant it applied for through AmeriCorps to run the program was approved by Congress, but the Office of Management and Budget refused to provide the funds for the grant. That office is managed directly by the White House.

With no renewed funding, the foster grandparent program in mid-Missouri and communities across the country shut down this summer.

“It was upsetting,” Jones said. “I’m losing that extra money. But at the same time, I was losing my kids. I was losing my kids, and that’s what bothered me most. That I would lose my kids.”

CMCA received a $425,358 grant from AmeriCorps to fund the grant in fiscal year 2024, the last year the program was fully funded.

“It really was a crushing blow to not get any acknowledgement for those years of service, but to pull the rug out from under us while we were running the program,” said Darin Preis, the executive director of CMCA.

With federal funding frozen, Preis said it’s unlikely the program can find this money from anywhere else.

“I don’t know who that would be, I don’t know of any sources locally that provide that much money per year,” he said.

Julie McNeill managed the foster grandparent program for CMCA for 12 years. She and Janet Evans, who worked with the program for nine years, were the only two full-time employees for foster grandparents in mid-Missouri.

“We wanted the community to know what a loss this will be for everybody involved,” McNeill said. “You know, the volunteers, the kids, the teachers, the other people we supported.”

Nationally, the foster grandparents program just celebrated its 60th birthday.

Though the program is currently no more, McNeill said its mission, and people’s need to fulfill it, persists.

“Sixty years ago when this program was started, it was about putting two vulnerable populations together: low-income seniors and kids,” McNeill said. “And, lots of things have changed in the last 60 years, but that hasn’t changed. That relationship and that inter-generational support has been there that whole time.”

Jones and the other foster grandparent volunteers first found out the program was ending through a letter in the mail. McNeill quickly called everyone together for a meeting to announce the news was true. Jones said she offered to protest and carry a sign but knew it probably wouldn’t change the outcome.

As broad federal funding cuts dismantle aid and community involvement programs across the country, Preis said some of the organizations being hurt don’t cost taxpayers all that much money in the bigger picture.

“Discretionary funding in the federal budget is a tiny, tiny little portion,” Preis said. “So, all of the programs at Central Missouri Community Action make up the smallest fraction of funding of federal dollars.”

Preis highlighted other senior volunteer opportunities, such as the United Way Give 5 program.

Still, for Jones, not going back to school wasn’t an option.

“I’m going back,” she said. “I’m still going to go back. I’m not going to take any money for it, because there’s no money to be had, but I’m going back and I’m going to be with the kids, and I feel that that’s my place.”

Through some financial help from her own grandchildren and the permission of Benton Elementary School’s principal, Jones will be back in the classroom this fall, still being Grandma.

Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.