Mentors Bring Leadership and Life Lessons to Middle School Students in Windsor

By Hugh McQuaid

December 10 @ 9:00 am

Devonté Dillion, on left, and Sen. Doug McCrory, right, speak with students at Sage Park Middle School on Dec. 4. Credit: Lukas Houle / Senate Democrats

Well before the first bell signaled the start of the day at Sage Park Middle School on Wednesday, a handful of students had braved the early morning frost and crowded around a conference room table to hear words of encouragement from their state senator.

“I think that, as a senator, it’s very important for me to check in on our students’ wellness because you don’t always have a lot of these opportunities,” Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, told the group of seventh and eighth graders at the Windsor school.

The students had gathered for a weekly mentorship program run by Devonté Dillion, of Dilligence Training. In addition to running an East Hartford-based health and wellness center, Dillion and co-founder Terrell Huff run mentorship programs aimed at young people in the greater Hartford area.

In a November interview, the two men often repeated the phrase “Be who you needed growing up” as a kind of guiding principle for their youth outreach efforts. Though their business largely centers around physical fitness, Dillion said they encourage young people to develop holistic identities that do not focus exclusively on sports.

“You have to think about what life after sports looks like,” said Dillion, who played football for Windsor High School and later for the American International College. “Don’t have your identity shaped around sports because you’re more than an athlete. At their age, I wasn’t exposed to that type of talk and I feel like that can save a kid’s life. I was someone who didn’t hear that and I fell into a dark pit because I didn’t know what was next.”

McCrory, a former guard for the University of Hartford’s men’s basketball team, seemed to understand the necessity of planning for life after sports as he quizzed the seventh and eighth graders on their post-academic plans. Some students told the senator they hoped to play basketball or baseball professionally.

“What’s your fallback position when you finish playing basketball?” McCrory asked one student. “What are you going to do after you hit all those home runs?” he asked another. Some answered with career options like “engineer” and “law enforcement.”

The senator smiled, praised their choices, and offered up another idea. “We need a program that starts with kids your age and teaches them to become teachers,” McCrory, a career educator, said.

As the young people chatted with Dillion and McCrory, Sage Park Middle School Principal Liana Jorgensen remarked on the importance of the Dilligence mentorship program and the rare opportunity for her students to engage and interact with a state senator who looks like them.

The principal recalled listening to Dillion teach the group the importance of a firm handshake among other key social skills.

“I’m starting to feel like it’s catching on and I love it,” Jorgensen said. “This is a journey for these children and, knowing some of these kids, this is going to be a worthwhile journey for them. This will make a big difference and can change the trajectory of some of their lives, believe it or not.”

However, Jorgensen said it is often difficult to find mentors who are willing to take time to work with middle school students.

“So when Devonté came along with this program, we were like ‘Yes! We’ll take it,’” she said. “We told them, ‘If you can get the funding, we will make it work.’”

Dillion and Huff said in November that McCrory had helped them tackle those financial barriers by connecting them with grant funding. As of Wednesday, they were offering a wellness program for Windsor Public School faculty members and were five weeks into their mentorship program with about a dozen students at Sage Park Middle School.

Dillion said the students had been making observable progress. Over the course of the program, they have built self esteem, confidence and a willingness to express themselves in public — areas where he said pandemic-era remote learning had disrupted the development of some young people.

“They’re more open to sharing their thoughts,” he said. “Social skills are something that they’ve almost been deprived of due to the pandemic. So I feel like this is creating a space for them to be aware of how they feel and how to put that into words.”

McCrory urged the students to have fun with the program and make the most of the mentor they had found in Dillion.

“He’s going to give to you everything he’s been taught and that’s how we win: stay focused, keep doing the work,” McCrory said. “He really sees something in you all. Just like I saw something in him.”

For his part, Dillion told the students what the state senator had told him, when the two first met several years earlier.

“One thing he said that really stuck with me is, ‘Keep going, don’t stop. I’ve got my eye on you,’” Dillion said. “From there, I never let my foot off the gas. It’s about being consistent. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I always move with intention and integrity. That will get you into so many rooms and open up so many opportunities. Just stay true to who you are and do things for the right reasons.”